“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
“How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them?”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale
Bell
There was a bell
that rang
in my dreams.
It was beautiful
and I
was careful
not to ring it
too loudly --
lest I wake.
-Andrea Cohen
The southern hemisphere of Jupiter, Feb. 17, 2020, by NASA’s Juno mission, as assembled by citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS
Source: solarsystem.nasa.gov
“So that where I once did not know who or what you were, now I wonder who I or we are, or what. What planet is this anyway, my dear?”
-Stanley Crawford, Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine
When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.
Joy Harjo
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (via mythologyofblue)
I think unconsciously I was afraid that if she asked me how I felt, my unleashed grief and rage would kill us all. In some unadmitted corner of myself I was already weeping and screaming and begging her not to leave me, not to go. If I started crying for real, only her comfort could make me stop, and if she died before she had finished comforting me, then I would be left to cry forever.
Jean Hegland, Into the Forest
Library stamp as snail, polyp, beetle.
Throughout The Zoological Journal By Thomas Bell (1828). Original from the Lyon Public Library. Digitized August 16, 2011.
Source: books.google.com
The eyes painted on Egyptian sarcophagi are not there for us to see; they are there so the interred person can watch.
Jerry Saltz
Source: vulture.com
But when I crossed the threshold it was at once the only house I had ever known. It still smelled of my childhood, still held the ghosts of both my parents, the ghosts of all my former selves.
Jean Hegland
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“Matins” by Louise Glück
You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?