I Am My Lover. I Am The One That Tends My Garden. I Am The One I Will Always Say Goodnight To Last.

– Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Van Gogh”

On turning  24 and shedding skin

I walked through being 23 empty-handed & lonesome; stripped off the warmth in the mold that casted my existence. A complete year away from the lands I used to call home. Being 23 was very much about trying to become both tender as the blue in the sky & daredevil as the red dancing in flames. In aiming to be everything, life felt wilder than ever before; in aiming for the sun, my thinking sometimes got reduced to mere shorthand. A year I finally dared to flood. And in doing so, I ran face first into several walls that tore open my skin. I learned that some people will lie straight to your face; and it’s not like in the Hollywood realm where an evil look or a stuttering voice will give away their lying. It’s usually the opposite: pretty, very pretty smiles that will convince you to run barefoot on shattered glass. It took time and guts to wrap my head around the idea that it’s okay to walk into these labyrinths; to understand that some of the doors we open will lead to black holes and it’s not a crime but nature to let the body get absorbed into the void. 

Nature as living art. Nature as force. Nature as the shadows of our dreams. Nature as morning walks. Nature as being. My 23s were all about nature and my relationship with her. It felt like befriending a neighbor and finding out they’re cool as fuck: ‘hey you’ve always been there and it’s just now that I realize I’ve been missing out on great things all these years’. I bonded with nature and her frozen whites, vivid greens and Mediterranean blues. She held my hand and walked me barefoot through silent rainforest. She looked at me with eyes that shouted ‘dare to become’. And then it hit me: I’m more ready than ever to touch the world with my bare hands... even if it melts down in flames.

A lesson in forgetting:
 the past always heals faster
 when you’re not looking. The way we try and hold
 onto memories like they are more
 than water. The way we look 
into the pools of our past
 searching for minnows, searching for fish. A lesson in remembering:
 the water is always smoother
 in retrospect. Where are the waves? Where are the currents? The way in which we tell ourselves we could do it again. Dive in again.
 Make it out alive. Last night, your voice touched me in my sleep;
 I woke up thinking about waterfalls.

Kelsey Danielle, “A Lesson in Forgetting” (via pigmenting)

Dear god: I just want to be believed in. Dear god: I had a syrup dream – the sky was grey and sinking, clouds of sugar and milk. Dear god: We don’t have churches anymore, just the blood that we kept in them. Dear god: I named the animals and now they’ve named me back – deathgirl, gentle hand, silver teeth. Dear god: In the end, water is thicker than blood. Water is heavier than anything else. Dear god: Laila killed those cats with her bare hands. Dear god: I have difficulty with faith. Dear god: I have difficulty with apologies. Dear: god. Deer god. Dear, god. Dear god.

Olive Prays, Yasmin Belkhyr (via wildflowerveins)

Writing requires discipline, but disciplined writers are not necessarily prolific. Most good work gets produced over time, sometimes many years, allowing the writer to grow with the material, to allow her world, her command over craft, and her psychological maturity to coalesce at just the right moment to produce something of value. This process often involves dreadful periods of not writing, or, worse, periods of writing very badly, embarrassingly badly. As time passes in a writing life, the writer learns not to fear these arid periods. The words come back eventually. That’s the real discipline: to train the mind and heart into believing that words come back. … Be willing to wait. In the meantime, write when you don’t feel like it. If you can’t write, read.

Monica Wood, The Pocket Muse (masculine pronouns changed to feminine)

I needed to hear this today.

(via savetheteaboy)

And again today.

(via one-bite-at-a-time)

(See also: the Law of Undulations)

To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked.

Anne Carson, Red Doc> (via theclassicsreader)

Tell me, Atlas.