“Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them.”— Kurt Vonnegut
(via wordsnquotes)
Loughrigg Fell, Lake District, England
“be softer with you. you are a breathing thing. a memory to someone. a home to a life.”
“I cling to your memory alone, and you alone receive the overflowing of my heart.”— Mary Shelley, from a diary entry wr. c. October 1822 featured in “Journals,”
Mid-season
““Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.””— -Rainer Marie Rilke
Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Time can be slowed if you live deliberately. If you stop and watch sunsets. If you spend time sitting on porches listening to the woods. If you give in to the reality of the seasons.”— Thomas Christopher Greene, I’ll Never Be Long Gone
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this. Some days I do this again and again.
When there was air, when you could
breathe any day if you liked, and if you
wanted to you could run. I used to
climb those hills back of town and
follow a gully so my eyes were at ground
level and could look out through grass as the
stems
bent in their tensile way, and see snow
mountains follow along, the way distance goes.
Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go, I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again.
~ William Stafford, “Remembering” in The Darkness Around Us is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford (Harper Perennial; January 12, 1994)
“The one real requirement of life: an openness to what is lovely among all the rest that isn’t.”— Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Aurelia Plath written c. November 1956