You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the ( Read more... )

we say, when someone’s
sensitive. So touchy. So
dangerous and delicate and
ready to tip. Touching,
though, is sweet. And we
are touched by the gift,
the thought. Moved
into knowledge of care
if not love. Touched, too,
means crazy. God-kissed.
The brain lit otherwise. I hope
we’ve all known someone
who has got the touch, able
to ease a knot, make any machine
hum ( Read more... )

Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.

-Robert Hass

Driving down a highway in August, saving for later

the right word for now,                        desire whittled me

a tool I'd never seen before

but knew how to use almost immediately.

Tornadoes yellowed, revised the river & bovine lands

for sale ( Read more... )

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"In the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Santa Monica, fittingly on one of those rare days when it rains in Los Angeles, I stirred my tea, bit my lip, and realised that I still knew who I was. Paul must have remembered Saul, dreamt of his last life, the weight of silver and the perfume of whores, even after the momentary darkness disorientated him so. ( Read more... )

Things I am grateful for:

1. The faithful tropical sun that greets me every morning, and in kissing all the lush greenery around me with its glow, reminds me of all that is beautiful and well with the world. Despite everything that we're dealing with in the human realm, it's reassuring that nature just goes about her merry way.

2. My loving dogs - ( Read more... )

https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief

Some of the HBR edit staff met virtually the other day - a screen full of faces in a scene becoming more common everywhere. We talked about the content we’re commissioning in this harrowing ( Read more... )

(1) The world of nations tends to be conceived as discrete spatial partitionings of territory. (2) The relations of people to place tend to be naturalized in discursive and other practices. This naturalization is often specifically conceived in plant metaphors. (3) The concept of culture has many points of connection with that of the nation, and is ( Read more... )

"If the dead may bring time to a stop, therein surely lies their most important intervention in the humble course of a human life - although he had to admit that on certain occasions the dead are also subject to change, when the scales are tipped on the side of love. During that night he desired to be consigned to eternity, for he felt that he had ( Read more... )

You know your literature teachers have been successful when random lines of Shakespeare occasionally pop into your head (and sometimes for no good reason at all). Lines from Sonnet 116 have been in my head all day.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the ( Read more... )

A beautiful version of it in Spanish and German

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