The Rain Hovering Over The City For Days  Finally Fell. You Were Arriving After Years...

I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

“There is only now; and no matter how this war came about, no matter how it is run, it belongs to us. ‘Because I am involved in mankind’. And one must remain involved in all mankind, even uselessly, and even if one is intellectually conditioned to doubt and despair. Otherwise one might as well be dead.”

— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

An attempt to intensify the horror by containing it in symmetry.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

For, when what he knows as art is relegated to the museum and gallery, the unconquerable impulse towards experiences enjoyable in themselves finds such outlet as the daily environment provides.

- John Dewey, Art as Experience

Not to act in this tragedy, but to live

Alicja Rybałko, Curriculum Vitae tr. Regina Grol

There is a solitude in this world

I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

- Ada Limón, Drowning Creek

if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? [...] If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

Mary Ruefle, On Fear

My father bore a burden of impossible ambition. He wanted all things to be better than they were, beginning with himself and ending with this world. Maybe this was because he was a poet. Maybe all poets are doomed to disappointment.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

Love like the horse chestnut loves carbon,

like the sun isn’t millions of miles away

or doomed. Love like a blue fir amongst white pines,

like a wide shovel opening the earth. Rewind

your favorite moments over early dinners:

the correct identification of an olive tree, climbing

65 feet up a fat trunk, turning backpack pockets

into houses for leaves. Love as eagerly as sprouting seeds,

as hungry as a goat up an argan tree. Love like you are

spotting a red squirrel for the first time. Relish in your blooming

knowledge of Latin, wood chopping, propagation. Love as easy as

hibiscus roots drink rain. Breathe in the smell

of earth-drenched boots. Savor the quick-flowing photos of pheasants and hedgehogs and newts.

Live like a pioneer species. Love like sempervirents: evergreen.

Love like every green thing ever planted

will live long and never burn

- Christina Thatcher, How to Love a Gardener