“Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.” ”

—Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

“People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets.” ”

—Diane Ackerman, The National History of Love

“When Carl tells me it’s Rayleigh scattering that makes blue light, canting off molecular grit, go slowgait through the airy jell, subdued, and outlying mountains look swarthy, or wheat blaze tawny-rose in the 8:00 sun, how I envy his light touch on Earth’s magnetic bridle. Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.”

—

Diane Ackerman’s poem “Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)”

Part of her homage to the planets and science, in verse. Ah, how I am fascinated with the everythingness of everything :)

(via Brain Pickings)

Knife Going In

Tegan & Sara

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of Love

Song: “Knife Going In” by Tegan & Sara

iTunes :: Amazon :: Back to Brain Pickings

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”

—Diane Ackerman

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width as well.”

—Diane Ackerman

“Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. ”

—~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

The work of the poet
is to name what is holy
-Diane Ackerman

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”

—Diane Ackerman

“Kissing, we share one breath, open the sealed fortress of our body to our lover. We shelter under a warm net of kisses. We drink from the well of each other's mouths. Setting out on a kiss caravan of the other's body, we map the new terrain with our fingertips and lips, pausing at the oasis of a nipple, the hillock of a thigh, the backbone's meandering riverbed. It is a kind of pilgrimage of touch, which leads us to the temple of our desire. [...] It's as if, in the complex language of love, there were a word that could only be spoken by lips when lips touch, a silent contract sealed with a kiss. One style of sex can be bare bones, fundamental and unromantic, but a kiss is the height of voluptuousness, an expense of time and an expanse of spirit in the sweet toil of romance, when one's bone's quiver, anticipation rockets, but gratification is kept at bay on purpose, in exquisite torment, to build to a succulent crescendo of emotion and passion. ”

—A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman
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