"There are millions of suns left."

Commonplace book (with a few extras thrown in), because words are teachers and I am trying to learn.

[alliewood93]

I used to think that “beautiful” was for sunsets, flowers, women (oops), paintings, music. But lately I keep finding myself thinking it about everything. His face. Our hands. The quiet. Him.

[alliewood93]

This is crazy because it’s so early. But I think I’m maybe going to marry this boy. Can it really be this easy? It’s so easy with him. So safe and happy and good. So obvious. (This post is either going to make me feel really happy or really sad in the future. I just have to believe in the former.)

[alliewood93]

I'm in love with him. First guy I've ever met who loves me (in action) without expecting anything in return. Patient, kind, empowering. I had no idea that love could be this simple and happy and safe. Sorry to gush to you, tumblr. You're my only platform where I can. And wow, do I ever love him.

[alliewood93]

This is crazy because it's so early. But I think I'm maybe going to marry this boy. Can it really be this easy? It's so easy with him. So safe and happy and good. So obvious. (This post is either going to make me feel really happy or really sad in the future. I just have to believe in the former.)

[alliewood93]

Me, 20: omg look at this guy with his cool taste in music and smart jokes and slight direspect for the rules and also me Me, 23: omg look at this guy with his commitment to education and thoughtful beliefs and respect for my boundaries and needs

[alliewood93]

Just so you know, I was thinking of you.

Kings of Leon

[alliewood93]

Maybe you never fall out of love. Maybe that kind of gravity lasts forever. Maybe it’s just about learning to carry the weight.

[alliewood93]

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

Rumi

[alliewood93]

Brave enough to move 400 miles away for my first job.

Brave enough to speak calmly to an angry student.

Not brave enough to finish a beer when I’m alone with a guy, because whatifwhatifwhatifwhatif.

*actually, I don’t think it’s so much a question of courage as it is of fear.

[alliewood93]

Sunday morning, small confessions

1. I get really discouraged by what some of my students say--things that are unkind or ignorant. I know they’re young, and I know I was like that at their age, and i know that it’s my role to help lead them further. Maybe I get so sad because I know they’re parroting their parents, and because sometimes they sound a lot like the incoming president. It’s been hard to feel hopeful about people, honestly--because I know that while many people grow out of that behavior, a whole lot of people don’t. 

2. I’ve really struggled to go to church--including today--because I am exhausted and because i have found it so hard to connect here. I know that the best thing to fix these problems is to be brave and connect to a church, but I still feel stuck. It’s also tempting because I get so little time to myself, and I can get a little on Sunday mornings when my aunt and uncle go to church. 

3. I think I used to be a kinder person. This year has been brutal and I think my heart has closed off in many ways. I feel less and less safe around others, and less likely to be kind even to my friends. It’s really easy to isolate myself, but I know that only adds to the problem. In the past, I have been able to reassure myself that this winter-season of my life is temporary--that someday (soon) I will be connected to others, open, loving. But I worry a lot that that’s not the case--that I’ll be closed off forever. For example--obviously because I’m 23, I see a lot of my friends get married. It almost confuses me sometimes--how anyone could grow that comfortable with someone who used to be a stranger. 

Thankful that this tumblr is so low-profile. I’ll probably come back and delete this later, but like Kathleen Kelly says, I just need to send these questions out into the void. 

[alliewood93]

Ex-Boyfriend Tally, Jan 2017

2 married (what?) 1 disappeared 2 best friends (weird how life works)

[alliewood93]

Fragments

Read today that no work is ever lost. Keep it. Come back. Let it be second-best on its first time outside your head. ...ten thousand feet above her head, dreams swim, waiting to be born. ...my mind works like this. I collect pieces—words, art—fit them together, and hold them up to the light, like a stained glass window. Then the light pours through, coloring whatever it touches.

[alliewood93]

I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid. And that the reasons… That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we’re so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion. Well for me, as an American male, the face I’d put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff. And my guess is that that’s been what’s going on, ever since people were hitting each other over the head with clubs. Though describable in a number of different words and cultural argots. And that our particular challenge is that there’s never been more and better stuff comin’ from the outside, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole. Personally, I believe that if it’s assuageable in any way it’s by internal means. And I don’t know what that means. I think it’s fine in some way. I think it’s probably assuageable by internal means. I think those internal means have to be earned and developed, and it has something to do with, um, um, the pop-psych phrase is lovin’ yourself. It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do this.

David Foster Wallace, in David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

[alliewood93]

one year later

Here’s what happened: 

I fell in love, on accident, and then held on for dear life. I was holding so tightly, so closely, I couldn’t see that it was love, and not the good kind. There is a love that fills you, that breaks your heart open from the inside out. And there is a love that breaks you with its emptiness, like a window shattering in the suction of a hurricane. 

Months later, I cut my hands picking up the broken pieces, and wondered if I’d ever finish the job. 

And now it’s done, swept up, put away. The dust of it still blows into my eyes now and again, but when it does, I blink a few times, and let it keep blowing. I still wonder if it blows to him. I wonder if he’d recognize himself in fading lines on my hands. I wonder if he’ll ever admit, even to himself, he has not been the ocean but the hurricane.

I want to be a river. And in England, I found some of my springs. I am still making my way down the mountains and through the valleys, trying to get to the sea. When I hit rocks, I remind myself of waterfalls. When I find level ground, I remind myself to dig deep. 

And in spite of all the mistakes and questions and forehead wrinkles the last year has brought, I know now, like I didn’t know before: Within me lies the strength to define new borders, to give myself to others, to go forward. I know my depths. I know there is more to discover. Every day, I get a little closer to the sea. 

[alliewood93]

Fictional Women I Can’t Help But Want To Be:

- Elizabeth Bennett

- Anne Shirley

- Jo March 

- Kathleen Kelly 

- CJ Cregg 

- Dorothea Brooke 

- Lorelai Gilmore 

[alliewood93]

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity. Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte, “Everything Is Waiting For You”

[alliewood93]

Extemporanea, 8-17-16

How am I supposed to be a writer when I can’t even get my own thoughts in a straight line? I’m not talking about those “beautifully recursive spirals of thought” that, according to Zadie Smith, define DFW’s writing--at least, I think that’s what she said, and I think it was she who said it. Lately the little termites of anxiety and fear and just honest-to-God homesickness have so chewed away at my mind that it’s difficult to follow a thought for more than fifteen seconds, at most. They say that sleep deprivation can tip your brain sideways like being drunk can. I don’t really believe in getting drunk, but there have been a few moments where I understood why the word “tipsy” is so descriptive--in those few moments, I felt as if the table in my head had slanted just enough that i couldn’t keep it level, thoughts sliding off it like the pencils on my third-grade desk. And it’s the same when I am sleep-deprived, or tired, or stressed, or broken-hearted. The same sense of imbalance, of maddeningly imperceptible loss. “I used to be smarter in high school,” my friends and I joke sometimes. And in a way, this is true--in high school, I knew full-well how the table could tip, but I always felt like I knew what it looked like level. I was secure (level-headed, even?) in my belief that I was a good writer, a good reader, a generally good person. At the end of the day, I could bolt the table legs to the floor. I didn’t know then the truth I am learning now: it doesn’t matter if you bolt the legs down--not even the floor stays level when you’re at sea. 

Maybe good writing (good living, too?) is about finding your sea-legs--about learning how to transform chaos into fluidity. Maybe I just need some sleep. 

[alliewood93]

But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.

--Zadie Smith, from a radio interview.