#theme: self

[sazzyartist]

Is our fixation on healing, self-care & self-improvement making us sicker?

Part I: The more I focus on feeling better, the harder it is to feel better

[seasunandstar]

The trouble with you humans is that you are so concerned with staying afloat. Go ahead, be gouged open by love. Gulp that saltwater, sink beneath the waves. You’re not a boat, you can go under and come up again, with those big old lungs of yours, those hard kicking legs.

And your heart, she said, that gargantuan ark, that floating hotel. Call it Unsinkable, though it is sinkable. Embark, embark.

There are enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone you’ll ever love.

That’s what the Titanic told me this morning, me, lying next to her on the ocean floor.

There are enough ballrooms in you.

-- From "On This the 100th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic, We Reconsider the Buoyancy of the Human Heart", by Laura Lamb Brown-Lavolie

[seasunandstar]

"One Heart", by Li-Young Lee

[seasunandstar]

My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass, feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered what I would become and where I would find myself, and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard my name as if for the first time, heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off as though it belonged not to me but to the silence from which it had come and to which it would go.

-- Mark Strand

[seasunandstar]

Keeping Things Whole

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.

When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.

We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.

-- Mark Strand

[seasunandstar]

[I.D. - I am out with lanterns looking for myself. - Emily Dickinson End I.D.]

I see this quoted all the time and went digging; it's not from a poem, but a self-deprecating joke from a letter she wrote in 1856, describing her recent move.

[I.D. -

I cannot tell you how we moved. I had rather not remember. I believe my "effects" were brought in a bandbox, and the "deathless me," on foot, not many moments after. I took at the time a memorandum of my several senses, and also of my hat and coat, and my best shoes - but it was lost in the mêlée, and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. 

Such wits as I reserved, are so badly shattered that repair is useless - and still I can't help laughing at my own catastrophe. I supposed we were going to make a "transit," as heavenly bodies did - but we came budget by budget, as our fellows do, till we fulfilled the pantomime contained in the word "moved." It is a kind of gone-to-Kansas feeling, and if I sat in a long wagon, with my family tied behind, I should suppose without doubt I was a party of emigrants! 

They say that "home is where the heart is." I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings. 

End I.D.]

[quottakes]

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

[quottakes]

One Hand To Hold, One Hand To Carve, M. Shaw