"My heart was saying, 'Lord take away this longing, or give me that for which I long.' 

The Lord was answering, 'I must teach you to long for something better.'" -E. Elliot

"He walked slowly out into the sunlight. He thought: but the truth is so much more than that. Truth is too personal. Don't know if I can express it...Strange thing. You would die for it without further question, but you had a hard time talking about it." - Chamberlain, Killer Angels

On Hopkins Article Rachel Leon gave me ages ago - I LOVE!

I have been reading about Gerard Manely Hopkins - here is a beautiful description of him and his struggle to understand what makes life worth living, written by Paul Mariani:

"But what of those for whom the titanic struggle is all within, as with this lowly porter on the island of Majorca [the largest island in Spain]?
What of those who are bedridden, crippled, house- or prison-bound, who suffer with silent courage from depression or migraines, or who have been given the task of reading thousands on thousands of examination papers and whose salary they never see?
Does not the God who over millennia and with infinite patience has hewn the very continents, melting mountains along with glaciers, or each spring for untold ages past has veined violets cell by cell and watches over the slow growth of cedars and oaks and maples, can not this God 'crowd career with conquest' when nothing seemed to happen, as a man, who merely did his duty day in day out in a world without event, was molded cell by cell into a saint?"


-Paul Mariani, Hopkins' Late Poetics: The Christ-saturated Thing Itself, p. 111

love them like a gardener

I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit. ~Reginald Farrer, In a Yorkshire Garden, 1909

Buckle up, the NIGHT IS COMING!!!

It finally came - i ordered it on a whim & now I hold the slim maroon volume in my hand. "The Tiger Garden: a book of writer's dreams"

on one of the pre-pages is this quote from Anna Kavan's Sleep Has His House:

“Are you afraid of tigers? Do you hear them padding all around you on their fierce fine velvet feet?
The speed of the growth of tigers in the nightland is a thing which ought to be investigated by the competent authority. You start off with one, about the size of a mouse, and before you know where you are he’s twice the size of the Sumatra tiger which defeats all comers in that hemisphere. And then, before you can say Knife (not a very tactful thing to say in the circumstances anyhow), all his boy and girl friends are gathered round, your respectable quiet decorous docile night turns itself into a regular tiger-garden. Wherever you look, the whole night is full of tigers leaping and loping and grooming their whiskers and having a wonderful time at your expense. There isn’t a thing you can do about it apparently.”

perhaps there is no monopoly on fantastic dreams.

i want to hear their stories.

the journey begins at moonrise.