You can be angry about things but still make the conscious decision not to be cruel. When we remind each other to be kind, we’re not saying don’t be mad. There’s a lot of stuff to be mad about right now. But you can still be a kind and patient person. You don’t have to be mean to other people. You can choose.
There, behind the hills, and beyond the imagination, where the visible equals the invisible, I float outside myself in sunless light. After a short sleep like an awakening, or an awakening like a short sleep, the rustling of the trees restores me to myself, cleansed of misgivings and apprehensions. I do not ask the meaning of this sound: if it is a leaf whispering confidences to its sister in the emptiness, or the breeze longing for a siesta. A voice without words rocks me, kneads me and forms me into a vessel which exudes a substance neither from it nor in it, like a feeling searching for someone to feel it. Mahmoud Darwish, from A River Dies of Thirst; Rustling.
The world shines / like a watery moon / my body and mind / glisten like porcelain.
Han Shan Te-ch’ing, from Mountain Living: Twenty Poems; A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry. Ed. J.P. Seaton.
Don’t be afraid to suffer; return that heaviness to the earth’s own weight; heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas. Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans. Stephen Mitchell.
“Kyōka
suigetsu 鏡花水月(Japanese) - An idiom with the literal translation of
“flower in the mirror & a moon in the water”, and references
something which is visible and cannot be touched as well as the profound
beauty of poems that cannot be described in words.”
Tell me, what names have been whispered at your altar? What language would you like me to use when I whisper yours?
Kerry Banazek, from section iv of “As an Experiment,” Seneca Review (vol. 40, no. 2, Fall 2010)
Because coffee, the first cup of coffee, is the mirror of the hand. And the hand that makes the coffee reveals the person that stirs it. Therefore, coffee is the public reading of the open book of the soul. And it is the enchantress that reveals whatever secrets the day will bring.
Mahmoud Darwish, from Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982.
My heart is like a lone cloud / with nothing to depend on / so far away from the world’s affairs / what need is there to search for anything.
Han Shan, from A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry. Ed. J.P. Seaton.
Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I’d been living luminously between two eternities of darkness. Orhan Pamuk, from My Name is Red.
In the 1940s, photographer Josef Breitenbach and botanist René Devaux managed to take photographs of the molecules of odours. French botanist came to the conclusion that smell is composed of minute particles of matter. Being matter it is capable of being photographed. Breitenbach’s method is secret, but he went so far as to say it involves suspending the object above a dish of mercury. The particles of matter that make up the characteristic odour of the object then diffuse themselves into a monomolecular layer one ten-millionth of an inch thick. In photographs all smells resemble bluish-white smoke but have different shapes.
If the moon were a house, my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep. Adonis, from Celebrating Vague-Clear Things; Celebrating Childhood. Trans. Khaled Mattawa.
Even her hands shone with a white radiance, gleaming like a moonstone. Her beauty was overpowering; I was glad when she turned it away from me. George McDonald, from Lilith.
From nothing where meaning wanders in the wilds love comes, and remains strange, wider than we have pictured, and higher. Is there refuge among these embers burning? Adonis, from Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea.
#adonis #is this fire a god that seeks me in the dark
The fallen Angel Lucifer and the Moon on March 31 2020
This is the only post I ever want to look at ever again
This person: *takes photo of moon surrounded by clouds* Ah yes, I know exactly which mid-19th century painting of a biblical winged nude beefcake this reminds me of
in average
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