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“Want”
by Carrie Fountain
The wasps outside
the kitchen window
are making that
thick, unraveling sound
again, floating in
and out of the bald head
of their nest,
seeming not to move
while moving,
and it has just occurred
to me, standing,
washing the coffeepot,
watching them hang
loosely in the air—thin
wings; thick, elongated
abdomens; sad, down—
pointing antennae—
that this
is the heart’s constant
project: this simple
learning; learning
how to hold
hopelessness
and hope together;
to see on the unharmed
surface of one
the great scar
of the other; to recognize
both and to make
something of both;
to desire everything
and nothing
at once and to desire it
all the time;
and to contain that desire
fleshly, in a body;
to wash it and rest it
and feed it; to learn
its name and from whence
it came; and to speak
to it—oh, most of all
to speak to it—
every day, every day,
saying to one part,
“Well, maybe this is all
you get,” while saying
to the other, “Go on,
break it open, let it go.”
[via The Writer’s Almanac]
“Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently, and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds.”
–Henry Rollins
Desires
Like beautiful bodies of the dead, who had not grown old
and they shut them with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet —
that is how desires look that have passed
without fulfillment; without one of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a moonlit morn.
–Constantine P. Cavafy
“Sex-negative messages don’t keep people from having sex. They keep people from having good sex. They keep people from having pride in their sexuality, from sexual self-awareness. They keep people from asking questions about sex, and communicating with their partners. They discourage experimentation. They blur the lines between consensual sex and rape by framing all sex as an undifferentiated mass of ‘bad.'”
–From “Sex-Negative Education and the Spectre of Rape”
Love this.
A little over a month ago, installation artist Candy Chang turned the side of an abandoned house in her New Orleans neighbourhood into a giant chalkboard where passersby could write up their personal aspirations…
Before I Die, “transforms neglected spaces into constructive ones where we can learn the hopes and aspirations of the people around us,” Chang writes on her website.
Via: CreativeReview
“From a Sufi perspective, the whole universe is a phenomenon of desire. The Divine desire pervades all things & beings, empowering each according to its capacity. For the mystic, the truest education is the education of desire. By means of this education the indwelling Divine desire is liberated from the constraints of ego and becomes a force for the transfiguration of the world.” -Pir Zia Inayat Khan
Via: Rob Brezny’s Free Will Astrology
Listening to the stories of people who are consciously entering the end of their lives can be a powerful experience, and their reflections an amazing gift.
In a wonderful post by Bronnie Ware, a palliative care worker, she offers the following most common five regrets by people who are dying:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
I encourage you to read her full post in order to get the nuances of the above points. As she concludes:
Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.
“Spontaneity (the impulses from our best self) gets confused with impulsivity and acting-out (the impulses from our sick self), and there is then no way to tell the difference.”
–Abraham Maslow
via: Free Will Astrology
Via: Tumble upon johl
Today was the mildest day we’ve had in a long time. And while a few mounds of snow still bear witness to recent blizzards, it’s clear that spring has started flirting with us.
Walking along the local park trail, I noticed snowdrops and crocuses in full bloom that weren’t there even a week ago. And I was stuck by a sudden desire to dig some up and take them home with me.
What is it that makes us want to possess something as fleeting as beauty? I suspect that it’s not really the object itself we desire but rather our experience of its beauty that we wish to sustain.
There was nothing stopping me from simply enjoying the flowers in that moment, both for their physical splendor and as harbingers of approaching spring. They’re close enough to where I live that I can visit them multiple times while they’re in bloom. And their presence on the trail means that numerous other people can enjoy them as well. But something inside of me wanted to make them mine.
It’s like some people who focus so much on photography that they’ll say, “Ooh! What a beautiful sunset! I wish I had my camera!” What’s wrong with taking in the sunset right then and there? Why not simply experience it, letting it wash over and through you?
Now, I’m no stranger to a camera. But I can’t help but feeling that, if unexamined, such perspectives can distance us from experiencing a given moment in time.
There are merits to more enduring forms of beauty, of course. And I’ve been impressed with individual owners of great works of art who consider themselves to be stewards of a particular piece, knowing that anything of significant artistic and cultural value transcends the concept of ownership.
Yet we are really only given mere moments in which to experience beauty. To think that we can own it or halt the effect of time on it is merely illusion.
Exquisitely Human 