Tag: accomplishment

That one. The quiet healing road.

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face-portrait-duality

I am torn between two ways to handle this doldrum that has been going on for weeks, really since January, when I did at least get down a few small poems. The first way is to give in, to enjoy the light on flowers— yesterday white daffodils and white iris in the dusk— to enjoy this beautiful place, rejoice in the animal presences (Bramble at last comes up here to my study and curls up on the daybed…), to live the slow quiet rhythm of a day as a kind of healing. The other way is to ask a great deal more of myself, to drive myself, and hope to break through into deeper, more valid places.

~ May Sarton, Tuesday, March 9th. The House by the Sea: A Journal

Notes:

  • Image via Mennyfox55
  • Related posts: May Sarton
  • Inspired by Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” – […] I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.

Your Daily Horoscope Too…

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horoscope-psychology

Source: thisisnthappiness.com

Saturday Morning

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sleep-black-and-white

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. I am still pursued by a neurosis about work inherited from my father. A day where one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever. Tonight I do feel in a state of grace, limbered up, less strained.

~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Notes:

di·lem·ma (n)

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jump-hair-tuck

And it occurs to me that
there is a proper balance between
not asking enough of oneself and
asking or expecting too much.
It may be that I set my sights too high
and so repeatedly end a day in depression.
Not easy to find the balance,
for if one does not have wild dreams of achievement,
there is no spur even to get the dishes washed.
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Notes: Image Source: Mennyfox55. Related posts: May Sarton

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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meadow-field-hills-mountains-sun-poland-island-beskids
There are so many people who’ve come before us,
arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.
Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,
generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.
I want to try and be terrific.
Even for an hour.

~ Ada Limón, “During the Impossible Age of Everything,” from Bright Dead Things

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