life
“Life is too hard to maintain a constantly serious outlook. You have to laugh at yourself and the world now and then―see humor in undesirable circumstances, even harsh situations―or you will either rot from the inside or go stark-raving mad. Humor is power against the worst oppression. It lightens heavy burdens; it allows one to smile while in agony; it eases excruciating pains. In short, humor makes the intolerable tolerable.”
— Richelle E. Goodrich
“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers
I don’t know exactly what I mean by “hold something back,” except that I do it. I don’t know what the “something” is: It’s not sex—I’ve had sex pretty often, and I still hold back the “something,” whatever it is. It’s some part that’s a mystery, maybe even to me; but boys and men can tell they don’t possess it or haven’t been shown it, whatever it is, and that I’m not going to show it to them. This seems to draw them like ants to Coke spilled on a sidewalk in the summer. I feel it may be my essence or what I am deep down under all the layers. But if I don’t know what it is, how can I give it or share it with someone even if I wanted to? –Crescent Dragonwagon, The Year it Rained
The best things don’t come for free, nothing does. If there’s one thing I learned in school it was in an Economics class with a Russian Professor named ‘Sergei’.. that there is no such thing as a ‘free lunch.’ To get that free lunch there is an opportunity cost, something has to be forgone for you to get it. It could be time, time you could have spent getting something else done or it could have been the opportunity to have a more enjoyable lunch, but at a price paid.
There will always be opportunities open for our taking, but the decision to go for it lies in the cost of other opportunities. The difficulty is in trying to weigh the two when there is no nominal value in which the two can be compared. So we have two opportunities, we take a chance and choose one.. .whether it was the right choice, we won’t know and we may never know. Just remember though.. there was a cost, even if it was for ‘free.’
The sky
Is a suspended blue ocean.
The stars are the fish
That swim.
The planets are the white whales
I sometimes hitch a ride on,
And the sun and all light
Have forever fused themselves
Into my heart and upon
My skin.
–Hafiz, “A Suspended Blue Ocean”
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.
–TS Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
— Ellen Bass
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
— Walt Whitman
“Intimacy is based on shared vulnerability…nothing deepens intimacy like the experiences that we share when we feel flayed, with our skins off, scared and vulnerable, and our partner is there with us, willing to share in the scary stuff” – From The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton, Catherine A. Liszt
What can I give you, my lord, my lover,
You who have given the world to me,
Showed me the light and the joy that cover
The wild sweet earth and the restless sea?
All that I have are gifts of your giving—
If I gave them again, you would find them old,
And your soul would weary of always living
Before the mirror my life would hold.
What shall I give you, my lord, my lover?
The gift that breaks the heart in me:
I bid you awake at dawn and discover
I have gone my way and left you free.
…..The Gift by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
The Salacious Musings of Eros 