life – CLARITY AND CHAOS

Truthfulness to life—both fantasy life and factual life—is the basis of all great art.

Maurice Sendak, who died yesterday 5 years ago.

Life is perhaps
a long street through which a woman holding
a basket passes every day.

Life is perhaps
a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch.
Life is perhaps a child returning home from school.

Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette
in the narcotic repose between two love-makings
or the absent gaze of a passerby
who takes off his hat to another passerby
with a meaningless smile and a good morning .

Forugh Farrokhzad: ‘Another Birth’

Via Shaj Mathew’s Guernica essay: Poetry as Life, Life as Poetry about the Persian poet.

austinkleon:

Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life.

From her poem “Sometimes,” found in the collection Red Bird.

5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

Filed under: Mary Oliver

(thanks @nicoleslaw)

Mary Oliver’s Red Bird is great, people. Read it. Be astonished.

106-year Old Woman Dancing with the Obamas

Today in “I will miss President and First Lady Obama” and also “Why representation matters”: 106-year old Black woman Virginia McLaurin was able to fulfill a dream this weekend by visiting the White House and meeting the Obamas during a Black History Month celebration. So wonderful to see the joy on all their faces. So important to think about what has happened and improved during Ms. McLaurin’s lifetime.

The White House

on Sunday, February 21, 2016

Wonderful.

Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive.

Tennessee Williams Notebooks

When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

Andrei Tarkovsky

The main thing in one’s own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.

Maya Angelou (via purplebuddhaproject)

These are the days that must happen to you.

Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.

Chris Abani (via wordsnquotes)

We are all just here for a time—whether in this building or even on this earth. But the values we hold dear will live on long after we have left this stage. Our responsibility, while we are here, is to breathe life into them; to imbue them with the strength of our convictions and the weight of our efforts.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch (quote via Shakesville)