41
" The stars are brilliant at this time of night
and I wander these streets like a ritual I don’t dare to break
for darling, the times are quite glorious.
I left him by the water’s edge,
still waving long after the ship was gone
and if someone would have screamed my name I wouldn’t have heard for I’ve said goodbye so many times in my short life that farewells are a muscular task and I’ve taught them well.
There’s a place by the side of the railway near the lake where I grew up and I used to go there to burry things and start anew.
I used to go there to say goodbye.
I was young and did not know many people but I had hidden things inside that I never dared to show and in silence I tried to kill them,
one way or the other,
leaving sin on my body
scrubbing tears off with salt
and I built my rituals in farewells.
Endings I still cling to.
So I go to the ocean to say goodbye.
He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head
and though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one
for I have used them myself and there is no coming back.
Minds like ours are can’t be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.
I turned away from the ocean
as not to fall for its plea
for it used to seduce and consume me
and there was this one night
a few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewells
and just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone.
But I was younger then and easily fooled
and the ocean was deep and dark and blue
and I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones.
I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival.
Then days passed by and I spent them with my work
and now I’m writing letters I will never dare to send.
But there is this one day every year or so
when the burden gets too heavy
and I collect my belongings I no longer need
and make my way to the ocean to burn and drown and start anew
and it is quite wonderful, setting fire to my chains and flames on written words
and I stand there, starring deep into the heat until they’re all gone.
Nothing left to hold me back.
You kissed me that morning as if you’d never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss
like chains wrapped around my veins,
and if you see a fire from the shore tonight
it’s my chains going up in flames.
The time of moon i quite glorious.
We could have been so glorious. "
― Charlotte Eriksson , You're Doing Just Fine
43
" The season was waning fast
Our nights were growing cold at last
I took her to bed with silk and song,
'Lay still, my love, I won’t be long;
I must prepare my body for passion.'
'O, your body you give, but all else you ration.'
'It is because of these dreams of a sylvan scene:
A bleeding nymph to leave me serene...
I have dreams of a trembling wench.'
'You have dreams,' she said, 'that cannot be quenched.'
'Our passion,' said I, 'should never be feared;
As our longing for love can never be cured.
Our want is our way and our way is our will,
We have the love, my love, that no one can kill.'
'If night is your love, then in dreams you’ll fulfill...
This love, our love, that no one can kill.'
Yet want is my way, and my way is my will,
Thus I killed my love with a sleeping pill. "
― Roman Payne
45
" I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.
Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to
write to Washington, and even then,
whatever they said,
would you believe it? Sometimes
I would like to paint my body red and go into
the glittering snow
to die.
His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.
After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,
it was over, except
his body could not be found,
and you can do whatever you want with that, say
his people came in the black leaves of the night
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home down the rivers. Anyway
this much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it,
he will still be
so angry. "
― Mary Oliver
50
" I know a woman who gets tattoos all the time. She acquires new tattoos the way I might buy a new pair of earrings. She wakes up in the morning and announces, " I think I'll go get a new tattoo today." If you ask her what kind of tattoo she's planning on getting, she'll say casually, " I dunno….I'll figure it out when I get to the tattoo shop. Or I'll just let the artist surprise me." Now, this woman is not a teenager. She's a grown woman with adult children, and she runs a successful business. She's also really cool, uniquely beautiful, and one of the freest spirits I've ever met.When I asked her how she could mark up her body so casually and so permanently, she said, " Oh, but you misunderstand: It's not permanent! It's temporary." Confused, I asked, " You mean, all your tattoos are temporary?" She smiled like a sexy rock 'n roll Buddha and said, " No, honey. My tattoos are permanent — it's my BODY that's temporary. And so is yours. We're here on earth for a very short while. I just want to decorate my temporary self as playfully and beautifully as I can, while I still have time." I love this so much, I can't even tell you.I myself am not covered with tattoos. (Although I do have two of them. Before I went traveling for Eat, Pray, Love, I had two words written into my forearms in white ink: COURAGE and COMPASSION.) But I do want to live the most vividly decorated temporary life I can. I don't just mean physically. I mean emotionally, spiritual, intellectually. I don't want to be afraid of bright colors, or big love, or major decisions, or new experiences, or risky creative endeavors, or sudden changes, or even great failure. "
52
" On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.
For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.
Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.
While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone. "
― Charles A. Lindbergh , The Spirit of St. Louis
54
" I can't go to Amsterdam. One of my doctors thinks it's a bad idea." He was quiet for a second. " God," he said. " I should've just paid for it myself. Should've just taken you straight from the Funky Bones to Amsterdam." " But then I would've had a probably fatal episode of deoxygenation in Amsterdam, and my body would have been shipped home in the cargo hold of an airplane," I said. " Well, yeah," he said. " But before that, my grand romantic gesture would have totally gotten me laid." I laughed pretty hard, hard enought that I felt where the chest tube had been. " You laugh because it's true," he said.I laughed again." It's true, isn't it!" " Probably not," I said, and then after a moment added, " although you never know. "
57
" He chuckled into my hair. My body decided this would be a fine moment to remember that his body was wrapped around mine and his body was muscular, hard, and hot, and my butt was pressed against his groin. Cuddled up by a dragon. No, thank you. Let me off this train.
“If you keep wiggling, things might get uncomfortable,” he said into my ear, his voice like a caress. “I’m doing my best, but thinking about baseball only takes you so far. "
― Ilona Andrews , Burn for Me (Hidden Legacy, #1)
60
" I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is “it”… in the top inch of soil, biologists found “an average of 1,356 living creatures in each square foot… I might as well include these creatures in this moment, as best as I can. My ignoring them won’t strip them of their reality, and admitting them, one by one, into my consciousness might heighten mine, might add their dim awareness to my human consciousness, such as it is, and set up a buzz, a vibration…Hasidism has a tradition that one of man’s purposes is to assist God in the work of “hallowing” the things of Creation. By a tremendous heave of the spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into the rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst. "
― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
