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homesick for you

I don't pay attention to the world Ending. It has ended for me many Times and began again in the morning.

― Nayyirah Waheed

“One thing in our favor: some of this ‘becoming kinder’ happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish — how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was ‘mostly Love, now.'

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.”

- George Saunders

In an essay on contemplation, the Christian writer Alan Jacobs recently commended the comedian Louis C.K. for withholding smartphones from his children. On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained why: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”

As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”

- “My Distraction Sickness -- and Yours” in New York Mag, Andrew Sullivan

“She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.”

-- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.... One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.

-- John Berger, Ways of Seeing

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

-- Pablo Neruda, "XVII (I do not love you...)”

Are my palms rubbing your shoulders, or are your smooth shoulders rubbing my palms, making them drier, sharper, more perfect? The more repetitive a caress, the more healing it is. Water slowly grinds stone; caresses make the body light, chiseled, compact, the way it wants to be, the way it once had been.

-- Part IV of "One Touch in Seven Octaves," If There Is Something to Desire by Vera Pavlova

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.

-- Joan Didion, “Why I Write”

It's what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

Oscar Wilde

Letters of Ted Hughes

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.

- Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes. In a letter he wrote to he and Sylvia Plath’s son 23 years after her death and 23 years before his own suicide.

Yoga today

The theme was surrender.

When you’re in a situation that feels like banging your head against a wall, that feels like it pushes back no matter how hard you try, that never seems to get any easier - that can be the universe suggesting to you to try a different path.

Surrender can also be a deeper trust in the universe. A trust that there is a bigger picture, that there is a lesson in everything.

And to be here, to be you, to show up for yourself - that is enough.

An open love letter

To an old friend--

Sorry it’s been so long. I haven’t quite had the words in me.

I’ve had a weight in my chest over you. I’ve had this want under my skin, been watching words trip over themselves....

You are not the easy choice anymore. I have a Big Girl Job now in this ruse of becoming an Adult, and both of these things require my attention all day, which makes you not the easy choice by the end of it. (And I mean really, did you know the sort of morbid heaven The Bachelorette, a joint, and a lot of pad thai could be??) The easy thoughts are not those I share with you. They now sit atop the edges of wine glasses, flitting past vapid scrolling, within cool designer purses being an Adult earns you, in semiconsciousness, in fumbling in the dark, and often in others. Usually in others. You used to be enough to get me away, but now, I need bigger things: planes, people.

Truthfully, you still make me feel the most me. And isn’t that significant? I wish I could say being in regular love inspired beautiful pieces waxing on about thy summer - eternal, lovely, temperate - but really, it’s quite unproductive. And don’t even get me started on heartbreak.

In becoming an Adult, I’ve also shed some of the naïveté that I know enough to reliably write about anything, including myself. That realization alone is enough to make me timid to approach you. For a long time, I’ve chosen to find lessons in other things - mostly people, my mat, art by others. This is not due least to the comfort in shadows and silence, to be honest. That has been the easy choice.

When I was little, I wrote “to create something pretty” at the top of a long list of goals (so many others of which have been ceremoniously checked off, as it turns out I’m not so terrible at Adulthood). One day I would write something totally devastating, I resolved. Or at least a bunch of tiny, little, brave-ish truths. Now, at the end of my Adult day, I kind of get why Dad’s guitar has its place in the back of the downstairs closet. Some of the things that inspire that feeling of want under the skin shift and take on different forms as we grow. You, under mine, has not. So I’ll be better.

“Jealousy--at least as far as he understood it from his dream--was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart. But he couldn’t make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.”

- Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

I wish there were generally recognized stages of love, like there are for cancer, so that you could gently break it to someone without causing a panic. 'Listen, I love you, but it’s only Stage 1 — still very treatable.'

Tim Kreider, ‘Quirkyalone is Still Alone’ via NYT

It felt like an S.O.S., saying, ‘Does anyone else feel this way?’ That there’s something about the American promise that x, y and z are going to satisfy this itch that you’re not enough, that a whole generation found to be a false promise. No achievement or pleasure or entertainment or consuming is going to be the thing that makes you feel like everything’s O.K. And it really hit home with me. Because you really are still you when you go back home at night. No matter what award you’ve gotten or how much money is in your bank account, you feel the same going to sleep.

Jason Segel, on Infinite Jest's influence on his portrayal of David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour

Dear Human

Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong. You didn’t come here to master unconditional love. That is where you came from and where you’ll return. You came here to learn personal love. Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love. Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love. Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling. Demonstrated through the beauty of… messing up. Often. You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are. You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous. And then to rise again into remembering. But unconditional love? Stop telling that story. Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives. It doesn’t require modifiers. It doesn’t require the condition of perfection. It only asks that you show up. And do your best. That you stay present and feel fully. That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU. It’s enough. It’s Plenty.

- Courtney Walsh

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