a single kiss may contain worlds...

"She embraces me elaborately, ...casually as a breeze, softly as one caresses a flower; she kisses me as dispassionately as heaven kisses the sea, softly and quietly as dew kisses a flower, solemnly as the sea kisses the image of the moon."

-Soren Kierkegaard

Lush

undertow 

So you want to be alone

Run and hide inside your home

Watch you fall away from me

Sinking into misery

Taste your smile and hold my hand

Make you laugh and make you dance I remember this

Everything was in our kiss

Sink my hands into the sea

Reach your fingers up to me

Trust me one more time I can only try

Throw yourself to me

And I'll try to pull you free

Let me try to pull you free

-lush

"There is a crack, a crack in everything.  That's how the light gets in."
- Leonard Cohen

The only reason I have been able to continue to believe in god, is that when life is at it's worst I look over and see him hanging next to me.

After visiting a beloved friend who has been in my life for some 25 years, I find myself, on my return, longing again for her company.  Four leisurely days of lingering over coffee and knitting in front of a roaring New England fire had left me accustomed to her quiet presence.  One recent morning, I woke to find this message from her waiting for me...

"This morning I am reading Rilke's writings on Rodin, who he met and befriended. Every word is worth copying out to you for its beauty, sensitivity, elegance, truth and beautiful detail. I'll have to get you the book, or share mine.

Here is what touched me particularly this morning. On Rodin's hands:

"We remember how small human hands are, how quickly they tire and how little time is given to them to create. We long to see these hands, which have lived the life of hundreds of hands, of a nation of hands that rose before dawn to brave the long path of this work."

(And here, "things" refers to his sculptures):

"And the forms in Rodin's work are pure and intact; without questioning, he transferred them to his things, which look as if they have never been touched when he finishes with them. Light and shadow grow soft around them as they do around very fresh fruit, and more alive with movement, as of the morning wind had brought them."

In Rodin's words: "And this is because I devoted myself seriously to something. He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all."

The quote by Rodin brought to mind something profoundly beautiful by an author whom I love most dearly.  The following passage is from the short, perfect little jewel of a book by George MacDonald, The Golden Key.  In it, one of the protagonists finds herself deep within the earth after a difficult and arduous journey:

"At the long last, the stair ended at a rude archway in an all but glowing rock. Through this archway Tangle fell exhausted into a cool mossy cave. The floor and walls were covered with moss--green, soft, and damp. A little stream spouted from a rent in the rock and fell into a basin of moss. She plunged her face into it and drank. Then she lifted her head and looked around. Then she rose and looked again. She saw no one in the cave. But the moment she stood upright she had a marvelous sense that she was in the secret of the earth and all its ways. Everything she had seen, or learned from books; all that her grandmother had said or sung to her; all the talk of the beasts, birds, and fishes; all that had happened to her on her journey with Mossy, and since then in the heart of the earth with the Old man and the Older man--all was plain: she understood it all, and saw that everything meant the same thing, though she could not have put it into words again."

Ariadne's thread

"Where is the string that Theseus laid, [to] find me out this labyrinth place." - P. Murphy

a castaway

"I want to lie upon your heart like a castaway on an island... Listening to the beating of your heart like waves washing to shore..."

The River

"I want to make love everyday...

to gaze into your eyes of deep

mountain river water,

and tell you I adore you..."

-L.

a thousand kisses deep

Don't matter if the road is long
Don't matter if it's steep
Don't matter if the moon is gone
And the darkness is complete
Don't matter if we lose our way
It's written that we'll meet
At least, that's what I heard you say
A thousand kisses deep


I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat
You see, I'm just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second hand physique
With all he is and all he was
A thousand kisses deep...

-Leonard Cohen

The Songs of Eden

"It is my last wish that you burn the three hundred sixty-five letters, one by one by one. Do not fear that you are burning my heart down. When I first wrote the letters, I believed they would be what remained of me after death. Now I see that what will survive of me is not my letters to you; what will survive of me is my love for you. What matters is not what is written on the page. What matters is what is written on the heart.

So burn the letters and lay their ashes on the snow at the river's edge. When spring comes and the snow melts and the river rises, return to the banks of the river and reread my letters with eyes closed; let the words and the images wash over your body like waves. Reread the letters with your hand cupped over your ear; listen to the songs of Eden. Page after page after page, fly the bird path.  And maybe, maybe, you will feel something like my love for you."

-Gregory Colbert, Ashes and Snow

My Secret

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye."

- Antoine de St. Exupery

Kobayashi Issa

  
         Naked

on a naked horse

         in pouring rain!

Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827)

Tonight

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's.  She will be another's.  Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her. 

-Pablo Neruda

vulnerability

A profoundly beautiful talk on the nature of human connection. The first third is a little slow til she gets deeply into her subject, but it is well worth watching the whole thing.

"Brene Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame." 

"To let ourselves be seen. To love with our whole hearts, even though there is no guarantee."

a-flutter

"What is it about her that I find so compelling?  When she is truly open to me (rare, these days), I feel like I am holding a small, fragile bird in my cupped hands, it's heart fluttering frantically.  But it does not fly away.   It is that moment of wonder that I live for."

Ashes and Snow

"In the beginning of time, the skies were filled with flying elephants.
Every night they lay down in the same place in the sky,
And dreamt with one eye open.

When you gaze up at the stars at night, you are looking into the unblinking 

eyes of elephants, who sleep with one eye open,
To best keep watch over us..."

from Ashes and Snow, Gregory Colbert

yes I said yes I will Yes.

"...and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Jame Joyce, from Ulysses