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"This is the season when people of all faiths and cultures are pushing back against the planetary darkness. We string bulbs, ignite bonfires, and light candles. And we sing.” ~ Anita Diamant 

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Big, and Big.

“I am tired of little tight-faced poets sitting down to shape perfect unimportant pieces. Poems that cough lightly — catch back a sneeze. This is the time for Big Poems, roaring up out of sleaze, poems from ice, from vomit, and from tainted blood. This is the time for stiff or viscous poems. Big, and Big.”

~Gwendolyn Brooks, from "Song of Winnie" in "In Montgomery, and Other Poems - Volume 12 - Page 48" (Third World Press, March 4, 2008) (via Wait-What?)

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From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. You can make it home this way.

- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel (Penguin Press, June 4, 2019) (via Alive on All Channels)

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“When she made things grow, she experienced a kind of manifest forgiveness, an abiding moving-on and making-new that she found impossible in almost every other sphere of life. Even in her failures and mistakes—as when she learned that onion seeds don’t tend to keep, or that low soil temperatures result in carrots that are pale, or that fennel inhibits growth in other plants and should be propagated only on its own—she never felt chastised, for truth, in a garden, did not take the form of rectitude, and right was not the opposite of wrong. To learn even something as simple as to water the roots of a plant rather than its leaves was not to be dealt the harsh reality of cold hard fact, but rather to be let into a secret. In a garden, expertise was personal and anecdotal—it was allegorical—it was ancient—it had been handed down; one felt that gardeners across the generations were united in a kind of guild, and that every counsel had the quality of wisdom, gentle, patient, and holistic—and yet unwavering, for there was no quarrelling with the laws and tendencies of nature, no room for judgment, no dispute: the proof lay only in the plants themselves, and in the soil, and in the air, and in the harvest.”

— Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

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How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?

I put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn’t explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Houghton Mifflin, 2005)

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Whether the language of the body could ever fit inside a throat.

Now I remember: I was telling strangers at the birthday party about all the ways in which our cells are trying not to be forest fires. How inside each cell is a tuning fork and inside each tuning fork, the coiled music of our DNA...

I was thinking about how I am always running towards or away from myself. Why I keep opening my eyes underwater, what I hope to see...

Which I guess is like asking why the mind has a shorter memory than the body. Whether the language of the body could ever fit inside a throat.

— Ruth Madievsky, from "Tuning Fork" in Rattle #49, Fall 2015 (via Read a Little Poetry)

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Don't just show up. Transform the work, yourself, and everybody around you.

Well, it's not enough to be talented. There's a lot of talent out there, but it's owned by lazy, stupid, or essentially boring people. You can't just be talented: You have to be terribly smart and energetic and ruthless. You also have to become necessary to people, by working hard and well and bringing more than your bones and your skin to the project. Don't just show up. Transform the work, yourself, and everybody around you. Be needed. Be interesting. Be something no one else can be--and consistently."

— Katharine Hepburn, Interview with James Grissom/1990/Hepburn with director David Lean on the set of "Summertime"/1955/ (FB, Follies of God, April 30, 2018)

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#Odyseas Elytis

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My son pauses the game to say, “One time the wind was blowing so hard you could even see it. It was gray, and it pushed against you when you walked.” “Is this for pretend?” asks my daughter. “No,” says my son. “It was real, and you were there.” My daughter closes her eyes. “Yes, and there was no thunder,” she recalls. My son nods. “No thunder, but you could really see the wind. That’s how I know the wind is real.” - Jessica Kirzane, from the poem Abundant Peace

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pois!

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let go

“If you were to let the charge of life run through your body a bit more freely, if you were to contain it a little less steadfastly, would you be able to endure it? It actually takes practice to tolerate a higher volume of this "life juice” flowing through you. This is not an effortful practice, but quite the opposite: it involves lowering your various types of established resistance. It is okay to put “letting go” and “feeling really good” on your list of things to do!“

-Thanks to Gil Hedley - this is particularly powerful to me this beautiful summer morning.

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Endless and infinite waves of vibration lap upon the shores of our bodies. We float in a sea of frequencies as fish in those waters, and we are rarely if ever conscious of the fact. Instead we assemble a world by transforming those frequencies into a vision that exists in the uniqueness of our mind's eye only, and then we believe with great insistence that what we see is real, and deserving the stamp of "truth," without pausing to consider the alternative realities held equally dear by our fellow fish. How to pierce the veil and see what actually is, as opposed to the creations of our minds? I'm not even remotely sure to be honest! The mechanics of "seeing" guarantee that "how I see it" must be different than how another does. So perhaps "reality" is more of a composite to be assembled with the help of the whole school of us~ Or perhaps it is an alternative altogether different from anything a shared vision might come up with, given our capacity to witness it with our senses is ultimately inadequate. Either option is cause for humility. Just thinking out loud here!

Gil Hedley

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Carpe diem' doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible.

'Carpe diem' means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin servies. No R. Very different piece of advice. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things--so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant--pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist (The Paul Chowder Chronicles #1)

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Love is never wasted,

for its value does not rest on reciprocity.

C.S. Lewis

#c.s. lewis #love #kind #care

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“O human, I’m not mad at you for winning but that you never wished for more. Emperor of language, why didn’t you master No without forgetting Yes?”

— Ocean Vuong, The Last Dinosaur

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You'll notice that I haven't talked about love. Or about happiness. I've talked about becoming - or remaining - the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it's all about. It's not. It's about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.

— Susan Sontag, from "Notes on 'Camp'" in "Against Interpretation" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966) (via Whiskey River)