Rain From Gentle Eyes @wickeddanddivine - Tumblr Blog

“There is always a place where women live near trees that, blowing in the wind, sound like music. These women tell stories to their children both to frighten and delight them. These women, they are fluttering lanterns on the hills, the fireflies in the night, the faces that loom over you and recreate the same unspeakable acts that they themselves lived through. There is always a place where nightmares are passed on through generations like heirlooms. Where women like cardinal birds return to look at their own faces in stagnant bodies of water. I come from a place where breath, eyes and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies, or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to. My mother was as brave as stars at dawn. She too was from this place. My mother was like that woman who could never bleed and then could never stop bleeding, the one who gave in to her pain, to live as a butterfly. Yes, my mother was like me. From the thick of the cane fields, I tried my best to tell her, but the words would not roll off my tongue. My grandmother walked over and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Listen. Listen before it passes. Paròl gin pié zèl. The words can give wings to your feet. There is a place where women are buried in clothes the color of flames, where we drop coffee on the ground for those who went ahead, where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her. There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: “Ou libéré?” Are you free, my daughter?’ My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips. ‘Now,’ she said, 'you will know how to answer.’”

— Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory

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theoptia

Arseny Tarkovsky, from Eurydice

Text ID: And I dream of a different soul / Dressed in other clothes: / Burning as it runs / From timidity to hope, / Spiritous and shadowless / Like fire it travels the earth, / Leaves lilac behind on the table / To be remembered by.

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“After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.”

— Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus!