We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience – even of silence – by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
– Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels
Notes:
- Portrait – NY Times: Annie Dillard’s Impossible Pages
- Related Posts: Annie Dillard
So passionate and credible and possible…
Yes, and possible, just out of reach so many times.
Yes Annie!
yes, embrace it rather than fight against it
Powerful advice, I agree.
Reblogged this on A Word, Please. . . and commented:
Can mothers live the way we want and still give our children a nest feathered with maternal self-sacrifice and ferocious love? Do we not need to remain well-fleshed and skin-bound as long as they need us? Real question.
Deep question Misty…
Let each of us soar in our own way 💛
Yes!
I love the message. The visual is kind of harsh, but maybe that’s what’s driving the message home! <3
Diana xo
Sometimes some of us (me) needs a hammer to the kneecap.
Ouch!