bit by bit with pieces

[bitbybitwithpieces]

Stories happen only to people who can tell them.

[bitbybitwithpieces]

Richness of Being

How do I make my own magic? The path is not as clear as it once was: easy, questioned but with curiosity not trepidation. When did I become where I am today? And I do not mean who. 

Who feels hidden. A we among a me. A multitude within one body, a mind racing. I can feel joy and then I feel emptiness. I wonder at strangers whispering and smiling to each other on the train. Am I your source of amusement? You are, in some ways, the source of mine. 

This is a labyrinth whose center we idly seek. Do we enjoy the puzzle as much as we should? We are nostalgic for the days we wish would end once we arrive on the other side. The process is the closest thing we have to being limitless. 

I find myself wanting to go back, not necessarily to prevent regrets but to pocket richness of being. Knowing the tree by its leaf. The salamander by its spots. The bird by its call. Immersed in something larger than myself because I have always wanted to feel small—not in an insignificant way, but similar to how a letter makes a word makes a story. 

[bitbybitwithpieces]

Certain nights stay with you, a metal aftertaste in your mouth. The seconds cling to your body and you rewind time and you wonder, what if I said it to you differently? What if I stayed? You didn't stay, and you're proud of that. You didn't want to stay. You chose something else, but in actuality you chose what you already had. You chose to see it anew, to turn it over in your hand like a foreign object, examining all of its imperfections and finding it exquisite. Finding it lucky, even. Finding it yours. And that is when you let time rush forward again and you let the metal aftertaste linger as a reminder of what you can trick yourself into believing, feeling grateful that the trick, like most magic, couldn't be sustained.

[bitbybitwithpieces]

My work is incredibly important to me personally. It brings me joy and it brings me life and it brings me meaning. It doesn’t necessarily have to be important to the people who read it. It would be nice if it did bring them life and meaning, but it doesn’t have to. It’s not their fault that I wanted to be a writer. I just want to do it because I like doing it and it’s a pleasure.

Elizabeth Gilbert, The Rumpus

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10,000 Thoughts

I find writing to be an exercise in wellness like any other. They say the average person should take 10,000 steps a day. Perhaps writers should think 10,000 thoughts. The question is — how much must you put in ink? 

[austinkleon]

I don’t invent. It’s not about my signature. It’s something about perception. My eye picks up things in nature… It has to hit me as something I haven’t seen before, and that gets harder as I get older. But I’m not searching for something. I just find it. The idea has to come to me. I find myself in nature—the roof of a building or a shadow, something that has the magic of life, fragments I can take out and build on…. I have trained my eye to play with images. My eye is like a dictator for me. I don’t understand it, but it rules me. And it always surprises me.

Ellsworth Kelly (via austinkleon)

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The Fig Tree

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

[bitbybitwithpieces]

Problems of output are usually problems of input.

@austinkleon

[bitbybitwithpieces]

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Joan Didion (on keeping a notebook)

[hitrecord]

“Error 404”

[the-final-sentence]

How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe also troubled— roses in the wind, the sea geese on the steep waves, a love to which there is no reply?

Mary Oliver, from “Heavy” (via the-final-sentence)

[bitbybitwithpieces]

Why indeed must 'God' be a noun? Why not a verb ... the most active and dynamic of all?

Mary Daly

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I am reminded of how we know something is there, sometimes, by its absence, how dark matter is said to exist because of so much missing mass.

Matthew Salesses, “The Weight of the Future, The Emptiness of the Past,” The Rumpus

[timeshaiku]

A haiku from the article: Alexa von Tobel of Learnvest: No, Really, What’s Your Weakness?

[timeshaiku]

A haiku from the article: ‘The Light of the World,’ by Elizabeth Alexander

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week 2 doodles

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We write to taste life twice—in the moment and in the retrospection.