GK's Commonplace Book

A place to store and share some of my favorite quotes, book passages, and song lyrics

[gk-commonplacebook]

Help them live, yet lay no claim to them. Benefit them, yet seek no gratitude. Guide them, yet do not control them. This is called the hidden Virtue.

Tao Te Ching

[glitterkittythefabulous]

REDWOODS

The first time I entered a forest

I saw the trees, of course, huddled

together in rings, thin veils of mist

between their branches, some dead

but still standing, or fallen thigh bones

on the desiccated floor, but I also saw

the great buttery platters of fungus

climbing like stepping stones

up their shaggy trunks: tzadee, tzadee,

tzadee, each a different size: small

to large or large to small, as if some

rogue architect had been cocky enough

to install them on the stunned trees’

northern sides, leading up to the balcony

of their one ton boughs. I was here

to investigate my place among them,

these giants, 3000 years old, still

here, living in my lifetime. I should

have felt small, a mere human—petty

in my clumsy boots, burrs in my socks,

while these trees held a glossary of stars

in their crowns, their heads up there

in the croissant-shaped clouds,

the wisdom of the ages flowing up

through from root to branchlet—

though rather I felt large

inside my life, the sum of Jung’s

archetypes: the self, the shadow,

the anima, the persona of my

personhood fully recognized

and finally accepted, the nugget

of my being, my shadow

of plush light. I felt like I was

climbing up those fungal discs

toward something endless, beyond

my birth and death, into my here-ness

and now-ness, the scent and silence

overwhelming me, seeping back

into my pores. You had to have

been there to know such joy,

fear intermingled, my limbs

tingling: ancient, mute

-Dorianne Laux

[glitterkittythefabulous]

PARKSIDE & OCEAN

there is a kind of memory that feels, somehow

suddenly, like a wound, though not always, not until

one wanders back through: the dark, damp alley the only path

toward home—every place i have loved has forced me to leave.

and then there is memory as one might always wish:

bejeweled, like sugar on the tongue upon reentry.

what is the name for the scent that whispers mother,

the twanged hue of evening that gestures island,

limestone, cane, spume? Flatbush, i have sauntered away

from everything that has called me kin now,

as i have before, but in what little time we have left,

let me remember you, let me remember what lay beneath

your weather—your snow-born streams, your troubled foliage.

guinep, worship, convenience, heel and toe. old dream,

will either of us return to what we once were? to when?

-b ferguson

[glitterkittythefabulous]

[glitterkittythefabulous]

[nixscriptum]

[mournfulroses]

Simone de Beauvoir, from a diary entry featured in Diary of a Philosophy Student

[exhaustedwerewolf]

this is so rogue but does anyone have the poetry template that went semi-viral on twitter a while back? it was designed for kids but someone gave it to their mother who has dementia and she wrote a really moving poem about her experience.

[exhaustedwerewolf]

the minute I posted this I remembered enough of the prompt itself to find it and now I’m trying not to cry at work

on a totally different note is this response from a kid, which is also beautiful and imo no less profound. and shows how the prompt can be interpreted so differently.

[youwrotethisforme]

TEMPLATE:

My name is ...

Today I feel like ...*

Sometimes I am ...

And sometimes I am ...

But always I am ...

I ask the world, "...

And the answer is ... (repeat * words)

[rains-of-words]

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”

— Madeline Miller, Circe

[firstfullmoon]

Oliver Baez Bendorf, “Everything All at Once”

[thefugitivesaint]

[seekingstars]

IN 150 CHARACTERS OR LESS - Nikita Gill

[gk-commonplacebook]

[apoemaday]

To My Children, Fearing for Them

by Wendell Berry

Terrors are to come. The earth is poisoned with narrow lives. I think of you. What you will live through, or perish by, eats at my heart. What have I done? I need better answers than there are to the pain of coming to see what was done in blindness, loving what I cannot save. Nor, your eyes turning toward me, can I wish your lives unmade though the pain of them is on me.

[feral-ballad]

Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Of Wildflowers”

[glitterkittythefabulous]

Every time you do a good deed, you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone, that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.

-Charles de Lint

[apoemaday]

"To read only children's tales..."

by Osip Mandelstam tr. Robert Chandler

To read only children’s tales and look through a child’s eye; to rise from grief and wave big things goodbye.

Life has tired me to death; life has no more to offer. But I love my poor earth since I know no other.

I swung in a faraway garden on a plain plank swing; I remember tall dark firs in a feverish blur.