(mankind by chemist)

coruscant // edmonton, ab.

[beckysmithmandin]

[beckysmithmandin]

Any great novel that I can think of is actually drawing a character or narrative in such a way that is so brutally honest, in a way that you’ve thought, “oh, god, I never would have put it that way, but that’s it.” All of the sudden you come across it in a book, in such a way that you’re relieved that somebody actually got it down on paper. And you’re grateful because it is that awful or that brutal.

Philip Seymour Hoffman in conversation with Simon Critchley

[beckysmithmandin]

Per her direction

Now,

your work is to swim far across the lake to the cattle’s side, to act Lady Macbeth and hate cleaning house, to win velvet love seats in  bonspiels, and receive in post Bard’s sonnets from a boy whose black-rimmed telegram already arrived.

Your craft is to coach children to push both feet back on ice and to instruct men to read.

Find the heifer’s eyes, name her (not number) and divulge that lifeblood is in the squares of the IH days you’ve pinned to the fake-wood wall of the ancestral brake shop.

[beckysmithmandin]

june 22 (visitor in watrous)

Gas station before leaving Watrous, a CN chain clipped alongside the highway. A reflecting sun emerged. In that light I didn’t feel the town’s doziness, but its buzz amidst the glowing vast of its surroundings. The long single-lane highway from the city lends claustrophobia. The drive feels dangerous, one-way. It’s space travel or deep diving. But the people work through suspicion, becoming familiar and guiding. We stepped into the church my grandfathers built. It was Anglican, small and tenebrous, while outside main street held enough traffic to incite pause. The place is still alive, far out in those bright plains.

[beckysmithmandin]

today is Theodore's birthday.

Theodore taught me how to preheat cups for coffee & how to sliver dusty laundry into lace to string from the trees.

thank you and happy birthday, Theodore :) 

[beckysmithmandin]

remain in light

[beckysmithmandin]

heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.

[beckysmithmandin]

#selfie

[beckysmithmandin]

some days you will not get warm 

you will weep in front of the turntable, you will hide ashamed of your frailty,  how the web of relations breaks 

you, you will sleep in the yard grass  too cold because you can only  be alone.

those days you can only go to the ground  willing, lay into the soil, hold up your palms to prairie sky and whisper

here i am. 

some days you will not be fine 

but you were placed beneath this maple to wonder at the wind in its seeds,  to grieve our violence, to revere this sun,

to know that you will be warm once more, that

we need you. 

[beckysmithmandin]

for t, again

the table flame is as high as its candle  now,   t made tea & put on portishead

we do not work on poetry, and i do not spiral open but lean back far & laugh.

and i am ready to pull up my knees for snow, to let arms drag in simple static.

we are kids, still, with elementary attachment, 

moving from here  to a room  where all our clothes fit & we are never  angry. 

[beckysmithmandin]

san francisco, 2014

[beckysmithmandin]

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

[beckysmithmandin]

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” -mary oliver

[beckysmithmandin]

at Sutro Heights Park

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[beckysmithmandin]

[beckysmithmandin]

albino alligator (!!!)