Sometimes he thinks of her, of them. Of what could have been.
Sometimes it’s all he thinks about…
He can feel the weight of their lives in a single step forward.
And he is enchanted by the beauty of small things:
hot coffee,
wind through an open window,
the tapping of rain,
a passing bicycle…
— Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After
Notes: Quote via see more. Photo: Milka Awgul
and the way the smallest animals breathe
burrowed into the hills.
(her) ribs
expand a little,
her soft lungs fill
partially, she feels the world
come in softly
as she inhales a breeze.
~ Amanda Beth Peery, from “A Poem About Breathing”
Notes: Poem via 3 Quarks Daily. Photo: Lydia Trappenberg with Breathe
We’re so driven to make ourselves “better” all the time…
We are mercilessly hard on ourselves for our losses, our defeats, our wounds, our failures, the parts of us that don’t measure up.
This is a weekend in non-self-improvement….
~ Francis Weller, in an interview with Tim McKee titled The Geography Of Sorrow. Francis Weller On Navigating Our Losses
Photo: Nap time by Aku*S
For the sake of cleansing seconds
stare at something still.
Free from feeling filled
hum the sound of the sun descending
sitting in its final ribbons.
Watch what leaves shake
in the unseen breeze.
Feel your own fingers.
Let time be soil for time.
Let hunger set in
~ Sean Kearny, “Be Bored” from Press 1 (Fall 2014)
Notes: Poem from 3quarksdaily.com. Photo credit to JP Benante
A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.
– Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Photo: David Salter with rain
She likes it best when everything is very, very quiet.
~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel” (W. W. Norton & Company, January 15, 2019)
It is time to just go into a cocoon
and spin your soul.
~ Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel
Photo: Chelsea
I will cut adrift—
I will sit on pavements & drink coffee—
I will dream;
I will take my mind out of its iron cage & let it swim—this fine October.
— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry c. Wednesday, October 15, 1927
Photo via 8tracks.com
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us…breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little.
~Denise Levertov, from “Sojourns in the Parallel World” in The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov
Notes: Poem from Make Believe Boutique; Photo by Coleman Guyon
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