Obscure sorrows ...

“You were born on a moving train.

And even though it feels like you're standing still,

time is sweeping past you, right where you sit.

But once in a while you look up,

and actually feel the inertia,

and watch as the present turns into a memory

—as if some future you is already looking back on it.




One day you’ll remember this moment,

and it’ll mean something very different.

Maybe you’ll cringe and laugh,

or brim with pride, aching to return.

or notice some detail hidden in the scene,

a future landmark making its first appearance

or discreetly taking its final bow.




So you try to sense it ahead of time, looking for clues,

as if you’re walking through the memory while it’s still happening,

feeling for all the world like a time traveler.




The world around you is secretly strange:

some details are charming and dated,

others precious and irretrievable,

but all fade into the quaint texture of the day.




You try to read the faces around you,

each fretting about the day’s concerns,

not yet realizing that this world is already out of their hands.

That it doesn’t have to be this way, it just sort of happened,

and everything will soon be completely different.




Because you really are a time traveler,

leaping into the future in little tentative steps.

Just a kid stuck in a strange land without a map,

With nothing to do but soak in the moment

and take one last look before moving on.




But another part of you is already an old man,

looking back on things.

Waiting at the door for his granddaughter,

who’s trying to make her way home for a visit.


You are two people still separated by an ocean of time,

Part of you bursting to talk about what you saw,

Part of you longing to tell you what it means.”

Deep inside ...

It is very curious this state of pseudo drunkness that keeps my mind spaced out and this feeling that I have for a moment touched the untouchable ...

Living through today ...

 “...You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them - occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.”
 
Michelle Richmond

 

 

 

 

Unspent Time ...

“Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up.
We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don't exist.
But however we remember it––or choose to remember it––the past is the foundation that holds our lives in place. Without its support, we'd have nothing for guidance. We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has fallen behind is just as important. What defines us isn't where we're going, but where we've been. Although there are places and people we will never see again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we are.
There are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always. But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning to leave things behind.”

Brigid Gorry-Hines

 

 

From "Soliloquy of the Solipsist” ...

“I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
My eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon's celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humour,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott colour and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it's quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

Sylvia Plath

The shadow of the wind ...

“Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known,
For brooks that I had crossed,
...Before I met this flesh and bone
And followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last,
Yet name no name of ills.
Say only, "Here is where he passed,
Seeking again those hills.”
Witter Bynner

War against the ordinary ...

“In order to rise from its own ashes a phoenix first must burn.”

Octavia E. Butler

This side of paradise ...

“There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom. ”

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Nevermore ...

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Under A Painted Sky ...

“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”


Hermann Hesse

 

 

A Long Way Down ...

“You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things all a man's endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach. The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent."

Sebastian Horsley

Plain Truth ...

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”

Friedrich Nietzsche



Time Unveiling Truth by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

The Sense of an Ending ...

“I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being abides,
from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which the scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind,
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn.
I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered and I roamed through the wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice directed me:
-Live in the layers, not on the litter-
Though I lack the art to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”

Stanley Kunitz


Nude goddess with four arms walking through a field by Mario S Nevado



The cost of living ...

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” 

Marianne Williamson

 

 

The Crossing ...

“I don't think that anything happens by coincidence... No one is here by accident... Everyone who crosses our path has a message for us. Otherwise they would have taken another path, or left earlier or later. The fact that these people are here means that they are here for some reason"...”

James Redfield

 

 

Ramdom acts ...

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

Leo Buscaglia

 

 

Life passing by ...

“You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.”

Garrison Keillor

Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais

Sir John Everett Millais's Ophelia depicts a calm, drowning Ophelia surrounded by lush, blooming nature. Shakespeare's Ophelia, mad with grief, falls while picking flowers. Millais presents her floating in the water, her head, hands, and dress not yet submerged. The dark pool of water at her stomach on which her garland of flowers floats hints that rest of her body will soon sink below the surface. Ophelia's expression shows no panic or despair. Her skin glows with life yet, not death. The looming leaves and brush around her seem to swallow her as much as the water does. The flowers and green brush on the far bank and the brown willow reach out over her, while the green in the foreground closes in on her. Millais has not generalized the flowers on the bank or in her garland. He carefully renders the poppies and violets as symbols of her death and faithfulness.

The attention to detail--in the natural setting, the fading glimmer of her gown, and her elegant repose--characterizes a Pre-Raphaelite style, but here the effect of these details seems more poignant. Millais has captured a specific, fleeting moment just after her fall but before her death, and he has immortalized Ophelia. Every reflection and flick of light give the impression of frozen time, and it suggests that Ophelia, though unchanging on the canvas before the viewer, had not always been so close to death and would not remain afloat much longer. Millais painting presents a crystallized moment between life and death.

 

 

The time traveller ...

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”

 

Virginia Woolf

 

Rainy Parisian Sidewalk Cafe by Lindsarm2

 

The Name of the Wind ...

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.”

Patrick Rothfuss