August 2010
101 posts
The Art of Disappearing by Naomi Shihab Nye
When they say Don’t I know you? say no.
When they invite you to the party remember what parties are like before answering. Someone telling you in a loud voice they once wrote a poem. Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. Then reply.
If they say We should get together say why?
It’s not that you don’t love them anymore. You’re trying to remember something too important to forget. Trees. The...
“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness,...”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 tags
WatchIt’s my little sister’s last night in town. Tomorrow she boards a plane for college in Indiana.
Here she is, burping the alphabet, annoying my mother, and generally being a little sister. Oh, how we will miss her.
Watch(via dynamicopposites)
4 tags
On people who talk on their cellphones during a...
Please do not approach my register (or any register for that matter) with your cellphone glued to your ear, and have the audacity to point a finger at me in a gesture to “hold on a second” (while there is a line of people forming behind you), and then act like I’M THE ONE being rude when I don’t lower the sound of my voice to a whisper so as not to disturb your conversation...
The Tent
Outside: the freezing desert night. This other night inside grows warm, kindling. Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust. We have a soft garden in here. The continents blasted, cities and little towns, everything become a scorched, blackened ball.
The news we hear is full of grief for that future, but the real news inside here is there’s no news at all.
-Jalaluddin Rumi
a piece of august
On a bike with six new friends: riding through the streets at night, hollering & whooping, letting our lungs expand & our voices ring out in the darkness, singing “OOO! It feels good to be free!”, on repeat; past street lights, stop signs, slow rolling cars, drunks walking home (talking too loudly), houses with glowing windows coming from orange kitchen lights &...
AT LAST!
Summer started last night.
And that’s all I have to say.
1 tag
Hooray
For silence between silence and words that fall out easily, for mother’s friends and sprouting seeds, for peaches and mushrooms and chamomile-lavender tea, for big pieces of cake to eat all by myself, licking frosting from fingertips with no one else; for dips in the pool and swims in the sea, for summer and heat and the growth that is me.
2 tags
Memories Shared
You are a little pink book with little round hearts drawn in tiny black pen
in the right hand corner
of all your favorite pages
I am nostalgia at its best and sentiment at its worst.
“The best teachers have shown me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing...”
– Joseph Bruchac, Abenaki
Hooray
For books you can get lost in and movie theaters you can slip into alone, for ink-filled pens and recycled paper, for all the crickets and their harmony, for glasses of water by the bed and vitamins in the cabinet, for a sleeping dog and the comfort of candles burning, for good friends, few as they may be; and endless trails to hike upon, for birds and roadkill and the beauty of them both, for...
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
– Pema Chodron
“One place where ideas of gaining typically come in, where people get obsessive...”
– Larry Rosenberg from Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation
On pain & suffering
Today I wake up & realize that pain & suffering, when blamed on others, can never leave our bodies. There can never be an end to the blame game, to the pointing fingers game; it suspends on forever in our hearts until we wake up & choose to take responsibility for every ounce of feeling we are carrying within ourselves.
No one has caused me pain, no one has caused you suffering. Not...
“It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite- only a sense of...”
– Thoreau
