“No one sees me changing. But who sees me? I am my own hiding place.' – Joë Bousquet
“Treat all that is beautiful, good and true, just like a seed. Give it some soil, a hidden place in the heart – don’t display it.”
– Osho
I’ve been using all my offline time to do exactly that, LOL. And this beautiful photo makes for a perfect desktop wallpaper 😊
“O thou whose face has felt the Winter’s wind;
Whose eye has seen the Snow clouds hung in Mist
And the black elm-tops ‘mong the freezing Stars
To thee the Spring will be a harvest-time –
O thou whose only book has been the light
Of/supreme/darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night, when Phoebus was away
To thee the Spring shall be a tripple morn –
O fret not after Knowledge – I have none
And yet my song comes native with the warmth
O fret not after Knowledge – I have none
And yet the Evening listens – He who saddens
At thought of Idleness cannot be idle,
And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep.”
– John Keats
“I could lose myself in his voice; this happened not only on that first day, but frequently over many years. Sometimes I would miss the instructions he was trying to give me, but he didn’t always notice. I think he himself was sometimes entranced by his voice and lost the sense of what he had started out to convey. Perhaps that was why he sometimes preferred to be silent. I could understand that. My head also sometimes seemed more full of words than could ever pass my lips.”
– Romesh Gunesekera, Reef
“Like the first whiff of burning incense, or like the taste of one’s first cup of saké, there is in love that moment when all its power is felt.”
– Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro
“These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling their tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and swoop of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. “
– Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
But we are what we are, and we might remember
Not to hate any person, for all are vicious;
And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved;
And not fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.
– Robinson Jeffers
I chose the last few lines due to their powerful resonance; of course, it seems awkward to leave it like that…so here’s the entire piece if you would like to read it!
There was a man with a tongue of wood
Who essayed to sing.
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood
And knew what the man
Wished to sing,
And with that the singer was content.
– Stephen Crane
i
They’re out of the dark’s ragbag, these two
Moles dead in the pebbled rut,
Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart –
Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed.
One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough,
Little victim unearthed by some large creature
From his orbit under the elm root.
The second carcass makes a duel of the affair:
Blind twins bitten by bad nature.
The sky’s far dome is sane and clear.
Leaves, undoing their yellow caves
Between the road and the lake water,
Bare no sinister spaces. Already
The moles look neutral as the stones.
Their corkscrew noses, their white hands
Uplifted, stiffen in a family pose.
Difficult to imagine how fury struck –
Dissolved now, smoke of an old war.
ii
Nightly the battle-shouts start up
In the ear of the veteran, and again
I enter the soft pelt of the mole.
Light’s death to them: they shrivel in it.
They move through their mute rooms while I sleep,
After the fat children of root and rock.
By day, only the topsoil heaves.
Down there, one is alone.
Outsize hands prepare a path,
They go before: opening the veins,
Delving for the appendages
Of beetles, sweetbreads, shards – to be eaten
Of final surfeit is just as far
From the door as ever. What happens between us
Happens in darkness, vanishes
Easy and often as each breath.
– Sylvia Plath
Do check out more previously posted inspirational blurbs, poetry and quotes here!
If Poem by Rudyard Kipling – http://wp.me/p8sHnh-j
A deed
your lovely face
if not, winter
and no pain
I bid you, Abanthis,
take up the lyre
and sing of Gongyla as again desire
floats around you
the beautiful. When you saw her dress
it excited you. I’m happy.
The Kypros-born once
blamed me
for praying this word:
I want
– Sappho
Zelda Reville 