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yasmeen by Safia Elhillo

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“We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens, and it’s all part of the big picture.”

Anne Lamott, in Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

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I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.

-- Anne Lamott

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“Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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Whyn Lewis "Lying Low"

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Susan Sontag, from "The Dummy", featured in I, Etcetera: Stories

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“in March I’ll be rested, caught up and human.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath vol 1: 1940-1956

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sometimes i wonder, am i not a dreamer? or is it that i don’t dream your same dreams?

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Palestinians ride horses on Gaza beach as the sun sets in Gaza City on February 15, 2013. (Hatem Moussa/AP)

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Hum, Hum by Mary Oliver

1.

One summer afternoon I heard

a looming, mysterious hum

high in the air; then came something

like a small planet flying past –

something

not at all interested in me but on its own

way somewhere, all anointed with excitement:

bees, swarming,

not to be held back.

Nothing could hold them back.

2.

Gannets diving.

Black snake wrapped in a tree, our eyes

meeting.

The grass singing

as it sipped up the summer rain.

The owl in the darkness, that good darkness

under the stars.

The child that was myself, that kept running away

to the also running creek,

to colt’s foot and trilliams,

to the effortless prattle of the birds.

3. SAID THE MOTHER

You are going to grow up

and in order for that to happen

I am going to have to grow old

and then I will die, and the blame

will be yours.

4. OF THE FATHER

He wanted a body

so he took mine.

Some wounds never vanish.

Yet little by little

I learned to love my life.

Though sometimes I had to run hard –

especially from melancholy –

not to be held back.

5.

I think there ought to be

a little music here:

hum, hum.

6.

The resurrection of the morning.

The mystery of the night.

The hummingbird’s wings.

The excitement of thunder.

The rainbow in the waterfall.

Wild mustard, that rough blaze of the fields.

The mockingbird, replaying the songs of his

neighbors.

The bluebird with its unambitious warble

simple yet sufficient.

The shining fish. The beak of the crow.

The new colt who came to me and leaned

against the fence

that I might put my hands upon his warm body

and know no fear.

Also the words of poets

a hundred or hundreds of years dead —

their words that would not be held back.

7.

Oh the house of denial has thick walls

and very small windows

and whoever lives there, little by little,

will turn to stone.

In those years I did everything I could do

and I did it in the dark –

I mean, without understanding.

I ran away.

I ran away again.

Then, again, I ran away.

They were awfully little, those bees,

and maybe frightened,

yet unstoppably they flew on, somewhere,

to live their life.

Hum, hum, hum.

#mary oliver #hum hum #poetry

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Ben Toms (British, based London, England) - Floral Romance for Vogue China November 2017, Photography

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Sharon Olds, from "Little Things"; Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002

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Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland

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When you are alive enough, you experience intimacy in a thousand places. The world is nothing if not creative. And I am nothing if not touchable, if not malleable by nature. When you are alive enough, everything makes an impression–especially color, laughter, running water, the voice of someone you like. There is a tenderness so plenty you could never waste it. I savor the things I haven’t tasted. When you are alive enough, you are easily bruised by sweetness. I dare to be the mosaic life makes of me. I dare to be soft enough to withstand a thousand loves.

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“women in the rain” - marina abramović, balkan erotic epic

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overdue change is painful,