“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” ― Louise Erdrich

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”
~ Carl Jung

“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

“We can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”
~ George Eliot

We kept a broad audience, and we didn't make fun of people who had necessarily made mistakes in their life and burned them to the ground. We made fun of a commercial or a movie or ourselves. ~ Tim Conway

Splittings
 

https://40.media.tumblr.com/dfeffc4f...ik3qo1_500.jpg

[Adrienne Rich]

"I would have made a good Pope."



--) Richard M. Nixon

Shake It Up
 

"This weekend, shake off what didn’t work out, shake off what somebody said, shake off the guilt, shake off the past & move on w/ your life!"

“You can be the most beautiful person in the world and everybody sees light and rainbows when they look at you, but if you yourself don't know it, all of that doesn't even matter. Every second that you spend on doubting your worth, every moment that you use to criticize yourself; is a second of your life wasted, is a moment of your life thrown away. It's not like you have forever, so don't waste any of your seconds, don't throw even one of your moments away.” ― C. JoyBell C.

"Display has its purpose. But simplicity must rule our hearts."

"For Attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
 For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
 For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
 For beautiful hair, let a child run their fingers through it once a day.
 For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone.
 People, more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms.
 As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself and the other for helping others.”

― Sam Levenson

“Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.” ― George Sand

“I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty…you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.” J. D. Salinger

And in honor of National Poetry Day, one of my favorites. I had an email exchange with the author (who became Clinton's Poet Laureate shortly after) - every line is drawn from an Emily Dickinson Poem. But I emailed him because the last line was driving me mad - literally (almost) - I felt stupid when he told me what it meant. D'oh. Anyway, tactile and gorgeous.


Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes
~Billy Collins


First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer's dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

Oh, hell - I can't leave this one out -



For Strong Women

by Marge Piercy



A strong woman is a woman who is straining.

A strong woman is a woman standing

on tip toe and lifting a barbell

while trying to sing Boris Godunov.

A strong woman is a woman at work

cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,

and while she shovels, she talks about

how she doesn't mind crying, it opens

the ducts of her eyes, and throwing up

develops the stomach muscles, and

she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.



A strong woman is a woman in whose head

a voice is repeating, I told you so,

ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,

ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,

why aren't you feminine, why aren't

you soft, why aren't you quiet,why

aren't you dead?



A strong woman is a woman determined

to do something others are determined

not to be done. She is pushing up on the bottom

of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise

a manhole cover with her head, she is trying

to butt her way though a steel wall.

Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole

to be made say, hurry,you're so strong.



A strong woman is a woman bleeding

inside.A strong woman is a woman making

herself strong every morning while her teeth

loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,

a tooth,midwives used to say,and now

every battle a scar. A strong woman

is a mass of scar tissue that aches

when it rains and wounds that bleed

when you bump them and memories that get up

in the night and pace in boots to and fro.



A strong woman is a woman who craves love

like oxygen or she turns blue choking.

A strong woman is a woman who loves

strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly

terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong

in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;

she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf

sucking her young. Strength is not in her,but she

enacts it as the wind fills a sail.



What comforts her is other's loving

her equally for the strength and for the weakness

from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.

Lightning stuns. In rain,the clouds disperse.

Only water of connection remains,

flowing through us. Strong is what we make together,

a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

My mouth hovers across your breasts

in the short grey winter afternoon

in this bed we are delicate

and touch so hot with joy we amaze ourselves

tough and delicate we play rings

around each other our daytime candle burns

with its peculiar light and if the snow

begins to fall outside filling the branches

and if the night falls without announcement

there are the pleasures of winter

sudden, wild and delicate your fingers

exact my tongue exact at the same moment

stopping to laugh at a joke

my love hot on your scent on the cusp of winter[Adrienne Rich 1929-2012]

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.--Joseph Campbell

“Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow.” ― Mary Anne Radmacher

The most lovely metaphysical love poem - if you can "get" the references -

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

~John Donne


As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Another Billy Collins' that makes me LOL

The Country

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.” ― Deb Caletti

It's better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.--Elizabeth Kenny

“Let me wake up next to you, have coffee in the morning and wander through the city with your hand in mine, and I'll be happy for the rest of my fucked up little life.” ― Charlotte Eriksson

“Sometimes one has suffered enough to have the right to never say: I am too happy.” ― Alexandre Dumas

“Beneath the fearful, chattering mind is your indestructible, eternal, powerful Being, who can serve you in everything you do, if you only listen. If you drop your shoulders down from your ears, relax your tight belly, take a sweet, deep breath, and pay attention to the inner you.” - Elizabeth Lesser

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.” ― Henry David Thoreau

“You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.” ― Shaun Hick

“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” ― Stephen R. Covey