Porcellanopagurus is one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab.
—Lancelot Alexander Borradaile
CRUSTACEA. PART II.–PORCELLANOPAGURUS: AN INSTANCE OF CARCINIZATION. 1916
Category: salty sweet
Summer Smoldering
“Anyway it will be autumn tomorrow or the next day: I can smell it in the air—summer smoldering.”
— J. L. Carr, from A Month in the Country (Harvester Press, 1980)
Wide Orange Sky
“The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.”
― The Golden Compass
Big Time
There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years.
Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars.
Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It’s hard to live in all those kinds of times.
Easy to forget that you live in all of them.
Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
Escape From Your Heart
You will never be able to escape from your heart.
So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.
—Paul Coelho, The Alchemist
Happy Valentine’s Day!…
Neutron Star
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking
Upside Down
Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you.
And do not worry that your life is turning upside down.
How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
—Rumi
Single Seed
تل دھرنے کو جگہ نہ ہونا / Tall Dharnay Ko Jagah Nah Hona / a place so crowded that no room remains even for a single seed of sesame
— Urdu phrase
Not A Sprint
Like wine through clay,
joy in his blood bursting his heart—the bliss!
Robert Browning, Pheidippides
It is my 26th birthday, today.
More pressing is that my exam, culmination of the last 3 months of my life, is next Friday.
I am therefore resolutely trying to ignore the fact that my birthday has arrived until then.
It has been a marathon, sans doute.
