the sky has turned a bruised purple

Grace and it is rough as fuck out here

[fatemareads]

“intimacy means that we can be who we are in a relationship, and allow the other person to do the same. ‘Being who we are’ requires that we can talk openly about things that are important to us, that we take a clear position on where we stand on important emotional issues, and that we clarify the limits of what is acceptable and tolerable to us in a relationship. ‘Allowing the other person to do the same’ means that we can stay emotionally connected to that other party who thinks, feels, and believes differently, without needing to change, convince, or fix the other. An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.”

— Harriet Lerner in The Dance of Intimacy, p. 3

[kafk-a]

adrienne maree brown, from Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

[freshmoviequotes]

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

[melissem]

La Conversation, 1938

Henri Matisse

[chloeinletters]

For tomorrows newsletter

[quotespile]

The best things that happen I’d never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather.

Marilynne Robinson, Lila (via quotespile)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

some line, some love, some thing: I wanted to say I love you but I waited another day

Ahmad Almallah, from “Love Poem,” The American Poetry Review (vol. 51, no. 3, May/June 2022)

[metamorphesque]

  ― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

[text ID: To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.]

[resqectable]

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”

— Albert Camus, from Notebooks, 1951-1959

[lifeinpoetry]

                                                    & we’re just too tired                                            to walk home we’re                                                      just two boys lying

                  in the snow & you’re smiling because the stars                             are just stars & you know

                   we’ll only live once                           this time

— Ocean Vuong, from “Dear T,” Time Is a Mother

[lifeinpoetry]

Because a blade of brown rye, multiplied by thousands, makes a purple field.

Because this mess I made I made with love.

Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured.

Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.

Because my uncle never killed himself—but simply died, on purpose.

Because I made a promise.

— Ocean Vuong, from “Reasons for Staying,” Time Is a Mother

[lifeinpoetry]

you / wish you had the nerve to kiss / strangers or believe in love.

— Silas Melvin, from “Neurosis,” Grit (via lifeinpoetry)

[mothprincess]

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Afternoon on a Hill,” Collected Poems

[kafk-a]

Anne Carson

[angelscomeinfishforms]

!

Text from L Cohen’s final letter to Marianne Ihlen

[hrimceald]

Mary Oliver, "Dogfish"

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of the darkness. […] Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.

Nick Cave,  from The Red Hand Files (no. 6, October 2018)