January 2012
7 posts
On Turning Ten | Billy Collins
The whole idea of it makes me feel like I’m coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light— a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the...
How to Tell a Story | Shira Erlichman
There is a way of telling stories. A red pen. A teacher to move it. Instead you have hands, and a Light inside you, and Bones. Instead you have ideas, which ricochet, and an anger that won’t sit still, and dogs from outside which come to die in the quiet spots inside of you. And, deliberately, you have noise. You have rape, and cities, the noise of the dumb, and of the very rape of the earth, an...
Ten Things I Know | Richard Jackson
The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice...
December 2011
7 posts
Things A Person Is Not | Julie Beck
A person is not a character. You can’t know their motivation. You can’t cut out the bits that don’t fit just to simplify their story (he wants to get the girl, she wants to get the job, he would rather be right than kind). They won’t follow the script you wrote or serve as a vehicle to prove your point. They might not grow, they might not help you grow and there won’t always be a tidy...
Keaton | Elizabeth Bishop
I will be good; I will be good. I have set my small jaw for the ages and nothing can distract me from solving the appointed emergencies even with my small brain —witness the diameter of my hatband and the depth of the crown of my hat I will be correct; I know what it is to be a man. I will be correct or bust. I will love but not impose my feelings. I will serve and serve with lute or I will...
The Night
At the beginning there was no night. The night was unknown. There was only light and it was so intense, in the tropics, one seemed to be moving through aeons of blue, of vermilion, of green. The light was so strong that it seemed to be surging in the colors in the plants. That which did not have words spoke: trees talked amongst themselves and exchanged thoughts with the flowers. No one knew...
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
3 posts
2 tags
Listen
August 2011
2 posts
the laughing heart
your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats darkness. be on the watch. the gods offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your...
Respect
Notice without critiquing.
Appreciate without comparing.
Listen without interruption.
Question without objection.
Challenge without mocking.
Consider without doubting.
Discuss without criticizing.
Smile without hesitation.
Give without expectation.
Comfort without lying.
Guide without misleading.
Forgive without resentment.
Rest without judgment.
June 2011
15 posts
Morning
You know how it is waking from a dream certain you can fly and that someone, long gone, returned
and you are filled with longing, for a brief moment, to drive off the road and feel nothing
or to see the loved one and feel everything. Perhaps one morning, taking brush to hair you’ll wonder
how much of your life you’ve spent at this task or signing your name or rising in fog in near darkness
...
some clever stuff: 11 inspirational quotes to... →
someclever:
We all need a pick me up from time to time.
There’s something about inspirational and wise quotes that gets your mind churning and thinking about the positive instead of the negative.
1. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you…
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure. But the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. Failure means a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself to be anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might...
The world is our coloring book. Take time to browse your eyes and color inch by inch the sun to brighten patches left in the darkness. Everyday is a new page to shine over a new orange and violet to the sunset skies. Whiten the clouds and shade the sky blue. Let your tears run down the paper, dampening the dry lands and growing the shrubs; the pretty flowers bloom. I’ll grant a smile, the...
They'll
They’ll take your soul and put it in a suit, fit you in boxes under labels, make you look like the Joneses. They’ll tell you go a little blonder, suggest sky-blue tinted contact lenses, conceal that birthmark under your chin. They’ll urge you to have babies get fulfilled. They’ll say marriage is easy, flowers from Thornhills are all you need to keep it together....
May 2011
4 posts
Mission Statement
“I will seek to balance career and family as best I can since both are important to me. My home will be a place where I and my family, friends, and guests find joy, comfort, peace, and happiness. Still I will seek to create a clean and orderly environment, yet livable and comfortable. I will exercise wisdom in what we choose to eat, read, see, and do at home. I especially want to teach...
“There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other...”
– Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic (via misswallflower)
April 2011
6 posts
Live performance of Tenuousness by Andrew Bird →
Pensée
All of Paris must have been away on holiday when Pascal said that men are not happy because they are incapable of staying in their rooms. It is the kind of thought that belongs in a room, sealed off from the vanities of the world, polished roadsters, breasts, hunting lodges, all letdowns in the end. But imagine Columbus examining the wallpaper, Magellan straightening up the dresser, ...
“You’re lovely, but you’re empty,” he went on. “One couldn’t die for you. Of...”
– - ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
the poet sees the thing you cannot name
Her language mimics yours, but it isn’t the same. Sounds are softer, longer, rhythmic. You carry the world around in pieces and snapshots, She sees it all at once in blurs, and that is enough. Those strange scenes you dream? Visions of unsolved mysteries, The dancing bliss, the envy that you’re too frightened to speak, She knows them and recalls them And long after you’ve given up and left...
March 2011
8 posts
Poem Written at Twenty-Nine Thousand Feet
When you laugh your knees shake and I can feel like a joke unfolding then crashing into itself, a wave of noise but silent from the inside view. I wish you had been there with us watching the mountains and drinking beer in October. Lucky for us, the mountains won’t go anywhere, but we will or we did, and we’ll go back to the mountains and drink beer on the hood of Brandon’s car again and I will...
Sabino: I just read a comment from a 2004 article... →
sabino:
I just read a comment from a 2004 article by the NY Times about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:
She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She…
Ultimate Pirate Ship Bedroom (14 pics) - My Modern... →
That is one lucky lucky lucky six-year-old!
