I wanted to give you what no one could give me.

 

To the Hand

W.S. Merwin

What the eye sees is a dream of sight

what it wakes to

is a dream of sight

and in the dream

for every real lock

there is only one real key

and it’s in some other dream

now invisible

it’s the key to the one real door

it opens the water and the sky both at once

it’s already in the downward river

with my hand on it

my real hand

and I am saying to the hand

turn

open the river

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

--James Baldwin

 

The Sacrifice

In the beginning was the Word Papa why was that?

I studied philosophy, history of religion, aesthetics. And ended up putting myself in chains. Of my own free will.

--Andrei Tarkovsky

 

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

 

--T.S. Eliot

 

 I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

But I am learning how to pay attention.

Harmonies wander,

melodies develop and disintegrate;

but only rhythms can truly be free.

 

 

All I want to be is by your side. 

 Do not use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe, to create, to learn, to think and to grow. 

—Professor Richard Feynman

 

If all a man does is to watch from the shore,

Then he doesn't have to worry about the current.

But if affection has put us into the stream,

Then we have to agree to where the water goes.

--Robert Bly

 

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Mary Oliver Wild Geese

"One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too

 is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. 

A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel 

affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to."

  Solzhenitsyn

*Mariah Fee (excerpt, or 'quote')