meet me at the river

I am not the forest. |  I am the window overlooking the forest. |  I want to be the forest. 

[luthienne]

I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping (via luthienne)

[fleurren]

Got chills all over, reading a few lines of Sappho’s Come Close, noticing that they sound so modern, so true still to the current human condition + experience─so pretty.

[growaglow]

[luthienne]

can I request some quotes/poems/prose about a sweet love? something positive, indulging and adoring? thank you x

here you go, mi amor ♡♡♡

“...the world was made so that we could find each other in it.”

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

“Take me away from all these other people, my love. Let us go far away. Let us live our life, all new, all ours, from the very beginning.”

Katherine Mansfield, from Stories; “At the Bay”

“Understand, I’ll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows, with only this one dream: You come too.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Pathways”

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019), dir. Céline Sciamma

Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vanessa Bell

“Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my ways of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”

Mary Oliver, “How I Go to the Woods”

“When I think of little flowers that grow in grass, and little streams and places where we can lie and look up at the clouds—Oh, I simply ache for them—for them with you.”

Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to J.M. Murry, Feb 20, 1918

“And your letters, your sweet and dear letters—when I read them, I feel like a plant growing in light. And I forget my own shadows.”

Kahlil Gibran, in a letter to Mary Haskell, from Beloved Prophet

from Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes by Beatrix Potter

“You, Beloved, who are all / the gardens I have ever gazed at, / longing.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt of You Who Never Arrived (tr. by Stephen Mitchell)

Anis Mojgani, In the Pockets of Small Gods

“it were comfort forever – just to look in your face, while you looked in mine –”

Emily Dickinson, from The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson

“a thing most new complete fragile intense, / which wholly trembling memory undertakes—your kiss”

e.e. cummings, from Complete Poems 1904-1962

“There you are, and I am very glad of it. You have never done anything to me that was not good; I love you tenderly.”

Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to George Sand

Kedi (2016), dir. Ceyda Torun

“We feel that way together: sun-drenched, refreshed, touched by light.”

Carole Maso, The Art Lover

“I love you with all my heart. I see, when I am gloomy, your kind face, and I feel the radiant power of your goodness.”

George Sand, in a letter to Gustave Flaubert

“Everybody I met / gave me no rest / but you.”

Alice Notley, from In the Pines

“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“we are so both and oneful / night cannot be so sky / sky cannot be so sunful / i am through you so i”

e.e. cummings, from Complete Poems 1904-1962

Adonis, from Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea, tr. by Khaled Mattawa

“I can’t be half gentle enough, / half tender enough / toward you, toward you, / inarticulate, not half loving enough”

William Carlos Williams, from Paterson

Rumi, from Bittersweet (tr. by Fereydoun Kia & Deepak Chopra)

“...but for you, my love, I am more delicate...”

Clarice Lispector, from Complete Stories (tr. Katrina Dodson)

Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“One wearies of all things; never of you.”

Boris Pasternak, from The Year 1905; “Mutiny at Sea”

“...you are in me like the song in the nightingale’s throat even when it’s not singing.”

Dulce María Loynaz, “Poema LVII” (tr. James O’Connor)

[Original: “...estás en mi como la música en la garganta del ruiseñor aunque no esté cantando.”]

La Pointe Courte (Agnès Varda, 1956)

“You don’t meet the people you love, you recognize them.”

Anna Gavalda, from “Life, Only Better” (tr. Tina Kover)

“Maybe I’m getting tired – I can’t think of anything but nights with you. I want them warm and silvery.”

Zelda Fitzgerald, Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, May 1919

“It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.”

Vladimir Nabokov, from Letters To Vera

“I want to sleep with you, fall asleep and sleep. That magnificent folk word, how deep, how true, how unequivocal, how exactly what it says. Just—sleep. And nothing more. No, one more thing: my head buried in your left shoulder, my arm around your right one—and that’s all. No, another thing: and know right into the deepest sleep that it is you.”

Marina Tsvetaeva, Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke

“I’m thinking when awake, how sweet if you were with me, and to talk with you as I fall aslep, would be sweeter still.”

Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Susan Gilbert (Dickinson), 28 February 1855

“I have faith in you. It seems / that I could wait for your voice / in silence, through centuries / of darkness.”

Antonia Pozzi, from Confiding (tr. Corrado Federici)

“If you were a star, I would gaze by the window till dawn…”

Anna Akhmatova, from “March Elegies”

“And when will You come to see me in a dream and make night sweeter than night?”

Mary Haskell, in a letter to Kahlil Gibran, from Beloved Prophet

Feridun Oral, When the Moon Came Down

“and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you”

e e. cummings, excerpt of I carry your heart with me

“I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.”

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

e.e. cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962

[fleurren]

just a shadow

[bostonpoetryslam]

I slurp down oysters & wait to absorb that same potential for pearlescent shine. It’s not that I’m frivolous, just so good at wanting everything outside myself, so good at coveting light I forget you can see through it.

Sara Mae, “A Love Letter to the Tactile,” published in Boog City (via bostonpoetryslam)

[bostonpoetryslam]

The Art of Fiction No. 71

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry written c. July 1932 featured in “The Diaries of Virginia Woolf,”

[nogreatillusion]

We took another lap around the neighborhood and talked about the ways we want to be loved. In the stroller, Arlo held his own feet and told us words he made up on the spot.

It’s been so long since I’ve felt beautiful, I honestly can’t remember what it’s like.

I wore my wedding earrings tonight like a secret. I shook myself a cocktail until the shaker turned frosty. I saved my cherries at the bottom of the glass.

All of a sudden, it’s too hot to sleep with the windows open.

Arlo has his first real nightmare. He yelps like a wounded animal and I hold him for an hour, after checking for fever and bee stings. He blinks into the light and locks eyes with me, quiet and relaxed. I say, “I’m here I’m here I’m here.”

Oh, this is how I want to be loved.

[fleurren]

Instagram @kri.sta

[nogreatillusion]

The sense of being a supporting character, never quite a lead role, in anyone’s life, not even my own.

The nagging despair of having lost something that can never be replaced, like childhood or time.

I said, I’m having that feeling again, wondering why I’m even alive. And then we walked down the block to the mailbox to drop Mother’s Day cards in peach envelopes.

I never know what to do with my hands afterward. I feel empty enough to float right out of my life.

[fleurren]

it feels nice not to hold on to what doesn’t want to be there.

[fleurren]

grateful for every small thing and for the new ideas that come every day, though my surroundings haven’t changed.

[incarnatia]

“… it can be said that not only people but also places can suffer from melancholia, and a vocabulary of poetic fallacies has emerged to characterize some specific geographic instances: the suadade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkeit of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasglow, the dispiritedness of Boston, and the hüzün of Istanbul, the last a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Qur’an) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life.” 

— Alberto Manguel for Melancholy by László F. Földényi

[fleurren]

I’ve been tagged by @madame-verte to fill out this quarantine questionnaire:

Where are you isolated? (Country or city too if you like)

I’m isolated in a small, pretty apartment in Brooklyn filled with light, white walls, and the most brilliant sunsets. I am constantly inspired here, which keeps me sane in the midst of feeling like a caged bird.

What are you currently reading or watching?

I am currently reading Devotions by Mary Oliver and the Bible. Devotions is a book I don't really want to end, so I’m dragging it out. I am studying Mary Oliver, trying to find some semblance of the familiar in the joy tucked into her words. She is maybe as close to spring as a human can get, aside from my grandmother. She wrote about nature like it lived inside of her. I think an old self knew what that was like; I would like to get back to that. The fascination and adoration of everything. The Bible is my attempt to.

If you can go outside, what do you like to do during this time?

Taking breaks to walk in the warm sunlight, stopping to photograph the flowers. We’ve been on lockdown so long, the cherry blossoms I watched from the window have come and gone. At least there’s a balcony, and on days when it’s not cold, I make myself comfortable there, tucked into a warm corner of light.

Any fascinating concept you’re studying?

Like I mentioned earlier, I’m reading the Bible and trying to get to a deeper place of faith. I’m inspired by @madame-verte‘s answer to this question to make it a morning routine. I think that would be really nice.

Also, is the self a fascinating concept? Because I am relearning the parts of myself that were buried under years of trauma and chronic illness and watching them resurface. Fitting for this to happen in spring. It might not be fascinating to anyone else but it is to me--I’ve made more with my hands in these past few weeks than I have in a long time. I feel more like someone I could like, than I have in a long time.

What kinds of acts of creativity/forms of art are you currently doing?

I have a project called The Year Project where I take at least one photo a day for a year. I write captions to help me remember the moment or the events of that day. I suppose in a way it’s like a journal too. The last time I did this seriously was in 2016 and when I look back I’m able to remember that year better than any other, and as a result, I am able to hold on more closely to that time in my life. I picked it up again because I realized that one day I’ll need the reminder of who I was at 26 and what my life was like, more than I do now.

I’ve been taking photos lately when the sun is brilliantly setting through the window and casting shadows in all the right places. I’ve been branching out of my usual watercolor moon paintings and painting eucalyptus and small flowers instead. I guess spring has permeated more than I realized. I’m trying to write, again, slowly.

A song/s that resonates with your state of mind at the moment?

Immortal by Marina and the Diamonds has, so far, been the song of the season for me. Strangely, the words of the song were with me deeply on Easter. I feel like my music taste has morphed into something, but not something I recognize yet.

Favourite impulsive/’bad’ coping techniques?

Favorite? ... Well, impulsive, I guess, would be the creative spark I get at random moments, that has me literally running at times to pick up the camera or the journal, no matter what I’m doing.

Bad, would be the long baths I take when I get stressed during my work day (I’m working from home). Procrastinating things that give me anxiety feels good, in the moment, but it always has consequences...so I guess that’s something I would like to change.

Tagging: @lavenderrmoons  @infinitesplinters, @yllo-line @selfescaping

[fleurren]

You don’t need permission anymore to do the things you want to do. Sometimes we put ourselves in chains, for no reason other than a past conditioning where we were told ‘no’ enough times for it to stick, because something else we wanted was too risky, too out there, not possible.

[finita--la--commedia]

And now it’s spring, so my ideas are always so nice, sharp, inventive, and the dreams I have are tender; everything is rose-coloured.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), from “Poor People” (1846), translated from the Russian by Hugh Aplin “ А вот теперь весна, так и мысли всё такие приятные, острые, затейливые, и мечтания приходят нежные; всё в розовом цвете. “ (via finita–la–commedia)