My Hairy Heart

I know myself only insofar as I am inherent in time and in the world, that is, I know myself only in ambiguity.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (via senseofchampagnechic)

(via proustitute)

I have no idea what priests
dream of on Christmas Eve, what prayer

a crippled dog might whine before the shotgun.
I have no more sense of what is sacred

than a monk might have, sweeping the temple
floor, slow gestures of honor to the left,

the right. Maybe the leaf of grass tells us
what is worthwhile. Maybe it tells us nothing.

Perhaps a sacred moment is a photograph
you look at over and over again, the one

of you and her, hands lightly clasped like you
did before prayer became necessary, the one

with the sinking cathedral in Mexico City rising up
behind you and a limping man frozen in time

to the right of you, the moment when she touched
your bare arm for the first time, her fingers

like cool flashes of heaven.

—Lee Herrick: What Is Sacred (via grammatolatry)

(via grammatolatry)

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

—Frederick Douglass (via prettybooks)

And that’s why I have to go back
to so many places
there to find myself
and constantly examine myself
with no witness but the moon
and then whistle with joy,
ambling over rocks and clods of earth,
with no task but to live,
with no family but the road.

—Pablo Neruda (via wordpainting)

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.

—John Irving; My Movie Business: A Memoir (via wordpainting)

One curious property of the cuttlefish is that, once dead, its body begins to glow. This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity a few days after death, then ebbs away as the body decays. You can read by this light.”
-Srikanth Reddy, from “Corruption

—(via ahuntersheart)

There’s always that moment
with people, right?
You look back…
you can’t believe

how they just
don’t love you.
And how,
in the minute before that,
you didn’t know.

There was a place, near water.
The people had come
from somewhere else, and settled.
How we came to exist.
How we came to be here, everywhere
at once.

How could I say nothing?

Well, it’s a long walk ahead.
For a long time,
I didn’t know.
And it’s all just another
story about how life could be.

A psychic told me once I had the mind of a nun.
As if there would be only one kind, for nuns.
The offices of seers we consulted in the South
sometimes had chickens. The vestibules
were swimming with the poor—
bobbing, drowning, in our lake
of dreams and wishes.
Tell me everything
you want to do while there’s still time.
Keep in touch.

Think about the leaves
and the birds
in branches.
Think about the words
Big Picture.
The Big Picture.

For a long time,
I didn’t know what to say.
And of course I didn’t want to say it.
When everything depends—has always
depended on acting like nothing is wrong.

Fruit trees blooming in the blood drenched ground,
a ringing phone—
it’s what we’re in the middle of.

If we realized the extent to which no one understands
what anybody else really means
by anything they say, well,
you say we’d all go crazy.
But aren’t we crazy already?
With trying and pretending
and being mad about it—I mean angry.

There was a place, near water.
How we all came to be,
everywhere
at once.

My prayer is changing.

—Kate Greenstreet, 2 of Swords (via grammatolatry)