a meditation on water.
from Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros
“All the time I’m not writing I feel like a criminal.”
—Fran Lebowitz
The Denial of Death
Louise Glück
Remember when you kept what you called
your travel journal? You used to read it to me,
I remember it was filled with stories of every kind,
mostly love stories and stories about loss, punctuated
with fantastic details such as wouldn’t occur to most of us,
and yet hearing them I had a sense I was listening
to my own experience but more beautifully related
than I could ever have done.
“You gotta resurrect the deep pain within you and give it a place to live that’s not within your body.
Let it live in art. Let it live in writing. Let it live in music. Let it be devoured by building brighter connections.
Your body is not a coffin for pain to be buried in. Put it somewhere else.”
“It is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.”
— Rachel Carson, Lost Woods
"Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened.
Everything is gestation and then birthing."
Letters to a Young Poet, R.M. Rilke
"In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves. 'The so-called straight person is no safer than I am, really. The terrors that homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn't want to admit.'
As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it, but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual. One way to think about this is that homophobia is the outward expression of heterosexual misery; a kind of subconscious jealous rage against the gendered and sexual possibilities that lie beyond the violence and disappointments of straight culture."
-Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
“The best way to hone your skills and develop your own style is to just do the work. Over and over again. The more you create, the more natural it becomes. The more natural it becomes, the less you think. And when you stop thinking, this is when the magic really begins to happen.”
— Seth Apter (via artpropelled)