the orchids sit alone on the windowsill
the world continuing around them
yet they remained untouched
the cat arches it’s back
the rain hammers on the roof
and an orange glow fills the room.
but they hold their stem
delicately, wonderfully,
quietly.
like we must learn to do
I used to kneel by the west window of my room and look over to the lights of Boston that blazed and blinked far off across the darkening water. The sunset flaunted its pink flag above the airport, and the sounds of waves was lost in the peretual droning of the planes. I marvelled at the moving beacons on the runway and watched, until it grew completely dark, the flashing red and green lights that rose and set in the sky like shooting stars. The airport was my Mecca, my Jerusalem. All night I dreamed of flying.
- Sylvia Plath
Only when you drink from the river of silence
shall you indeed sing
And when you have reached the mountain top then
shall you begin to climb
And when the earth shall claim your limbs then
shall you truly dance
-Kahlil Gibran
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde
“Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understands, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.” — Virginia Satir
even if there had been a crescent moon
on every cloud-tip over the heavens,
drenching the evening with crystals’ light,
one would have wanted more- more- more- some true interior to which to return, a home against one’s self, a darkness,
an ease in which to live a moment’s life, the moment of life’s love and fortune, free from everything else, free above all from thought.
it would have been like lighting a candle, like leaning on the table, shading one’s eyes, and hearing a tale one wanted intensely to hear
as if we were all seated together again
and one of us spoke and all of us believed
what we heard and the light, though little, was enough
- Wallace Stevens
![(via jesuisperdu)
The reader who picks this book off the shelf where it sits alongside Shakespeare and Shelley and Stein—if such shelves still exist—and reads Stevens for the first time, or reads him at length for the first time, may not right away sense his ambition to write poems “to help people live their lives.” But this book is well poised to remind them that even the least reflective of us lives a life inside the mind. Having a mind and wondering what to do with it is not an intellectual predicament: it is a human one. No poet gives us more to think about or greater reward for thinking. But compassion for thinkers is at the base of [Stevens’] poetry.
Dan Chiasson of Wallace Stevens](http://11.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kryhu85tJa1qzt15co1_500.jpg)
(via jesuisperdu)
The reader who picks this book off the shelf where it sits alongside Shakespeare and Shelley and Stein—if such shelves still exist—and reads Stevens for the first time, or reads him at length for the first time, may not right away sense his ambition to write poems “to help people live their lives.” But this book is well poised to remind them that even the least reflective of us lives a life inside the mind. Having a mind and wondering what to do with it is not an intellectual predicament: it is a human one. No poet gives us more to think about or greater reward for thinking. But compassion for thinkers is at the base of [Stevens’] poetry.
Dan Chiasson of Wallace Stevens
(via julietinrepair)
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
