do the thing…
Available people are the ones who are dangerous,
because they confront us with the possibility
of true intimacy…
— Marianne Williamson —
the call of the wild…
There’s a whisper on the night-wind,
there’s a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling . . .
let us go.
— R.W. Service —
on lies, secrets, and silence…
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
— Adrienne Rich —
too often in life…
The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes.
Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves-or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature.
Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what?
Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.
— Sophie Scholl —
roc…
We are come late to the love of birds
for we are come late to love.
Before we had been nothing:
a fossilized egg, a tired metaphor, old as mutton.
Now, the sharp twinge of middle age
and we are caught in love’s punctured balloon.
In banana peel sobriety.
Furred epithet, feathered lash.
We are come late to the mythology of love,
the beefheart stain of the great winged roc
upon the ground of our imaginings,
soft like the centres of some candies.
Soft like the quilted centres of our beds,
our quivering bird organs.
Give us the sweeping shadow,
down from the mountains of Araby.
Give us the claws that catch
us from the desert path, swoop us,
fat white sheep in the meadow,
into that prickled nest, high, up high.
— Sandra Kasturi —
letters to a young poet…
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is — solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
— Rilke