Widdershins

ardently following the path less read

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"I want to learn to love like this, the way we love our dogs, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way our dogs love us." ~ Ann Patchett

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"All talk of paradise only starts when something has been lost." ~ Kevin Rushby

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Groundhog Day

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"When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks made them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine." ~ Zora Neale Hurston, "Their Eyes Were Watching God"

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"The opposite of essential speech is small talk, which does not directly express a man or woman's deepest needs, but which is really a way of avoiding them." ~ Nancy Willard

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CORRECTIVE FOR A BROKEN HEART

by Maria Popova

Why all the threadbare drama,

the stale catastrophism

of calling it broken?

It still beats,

doesn’t it,

still trembles at the sight

of fog flowing through the forest

like a slow dance song.

It was only

dislocated,

lost its locus

for a while,

popped out of the socket

of good sense.

There is no one

to pick up the pieces

because there are no pieces.

Only the firm, fastidious

hand of time

to slide it back

into place.

And after all

who can fault

the wayward compass

when the magnetic north pole

is in constant motion

drifting by fifty kilometers a year

and reversing itself altogether

every few centuries

while each twenty-six thousand years

a different north star

comes to shine its guiding light

above all the confusion.

We are here

to lose our way.

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Child Astronomy

After many hours

Of peering

Into a telescope

Goldilocks

Discovers a dipper

That is just right.

~ Billy Collins

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Close

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Alex Dawson (@alexdawcreates)

We had a few blissful days of false spring this week. Here’s a poem 🌼

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"A conversation with Socrates was often infuriating and disorienting, as one character from the 'Dialogues,' Nicias, attests. 'Anyone who is close to Socrates and enters into conversation with him is liable to be drawn into an argument, and whatever subject he may start, he will be continually carried round and round by him, until at last he finds that he has to give an account both of his present and past life, and when he's once entangled, Socrates will not let him go until he has completely and thoroughly sifted him.' "

~ excerpt from "The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers," by Eric Weiner

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Today I'll carry my grief

With light and casual hands

We'll go out together and stroll,

My grief and I

And if it slips from my fingers

To lie on the ground

An object among the grasses

And small flowers

I will let it.

I will let it.

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Today I cut an apple

It colors the air with flower scent

When I put it into my mouth

I taste a woman.

I think of you.

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Be Without You (Kendu Mix)

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Selected quotes from Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence"

" There are quotations in this piece that should have set off any editor's bullshit detector. 'When my husband and I want to take a trip together,' says the psychedelic mother of four, ' I just put a little acid in the kids' orange juice in the morning and let them spend the day freaking out in the woods.' "

" ' For the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way,' as Aldous Huxley put it in 'The Doors of Perception."

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Searchlight

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"There are two main scenarios. For the heroines of plays and romances, the motives for male disguise are many and varied, as are the consequences. But one thing is sure: girls in breeches turn women's heads. This is often known as the female bridegroom motif, because many authors ratchet up the tension by using an imminent wedding as a ticking time bomb for the cross-dresser, who may experience just as much erotic confusion as she causes in others." ~ Emma Donoghue, "Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature"