big believer in spinning yarns. i think it’s good and correct to tell a tall tale at a campfire. to get creative with your nonfiction at a party. to reel in that big fish with your friend late at night in the kitchen. our self-mythologies can be as real as we want them to be and i don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
[image description: Meme re-draw of what I think was originally a Succession screencap. Thierry Zoreaux Is curled up on the ground, head hung between his knees looking dejected. Isaac McAdoo stands behind him, leaning on his shoulders looking something between angry and supportive. Jan Maas stands above him, head out of frame, with one hand on Zoreaux’s head and the other scrolling on his phone.]
Gentle Mother, font of mercy, Save our sons from war, we pray. Stay the swords and stay the arrows, Let them know a better day. Gentle Mother, strength of women, Help our daughters through this fray. Soothe the wrath and tame the fury, Teach us all a kinder way. Gentle Mother, font of mercy, Save our sons from war, we pray. Stay the swords and stay the arrows, Let them know a better day.
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives– tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?
Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides with perfect courtesy, to let you in! Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass! Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint that something is missing from your life!
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
Well, there is time left– fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is the mystery, which is death as well as life, and not be afraid!
To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome with amazement!
To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw, nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the present hour, to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth, to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened
in the night
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said to the wild roses: deny me not, but suffer my devotion. Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red, hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters, caution and prudence? Fall in! Fall in!
A woman standing in the weeds. A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next is coming with its own heave and grace.
Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things, upon the immutable. What more could one ask?
And I would touch the faces of the daises, and I would bow down to think about it.
That was then, which hasn’t ended yet.
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light, I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge.
I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.
“As far as words go, ‘crying’ is louder and ‘weeping’ is wetter. When people explain the difference between the two to English-language learners they say that weeping is more formal, can sound archaic in everyday speech. You can hear this in their past tenses—the plainness of ‘cried’, the velvet cloak of ‘wept’. I remember arguing once with a teacher who insisted ‘dreamt’ was incorrect, dreamed the only proper option. She was wrong, of course, in both philological and moral ways, and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which ’d’ has never dreamt.”
