A Brief for the Defense

First day of the new school semester.

These past few days have been incredibly heavy, dark, and troubling. It is hard starting a new semester with this much weight, but I know things shift, change, and improve.

This photo was taken in Tulum, in stillness and silence.

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

– Jack Gilbert

 

Leaning into the coming season

So close to the end of other things right now. Today has been the kind of day where everything seems possible again. Maybe it is the good night’s sleep, the productive morning, the sun (*finally out to play), or some Haim at work . . . but, today is going to be good. The hard work and the long days are finally starting to pay off.

That’s all.

(Old photo –> re-liked: Pancake rocks, New Zealand)

Muscle of Difficulty 

November’s clench. A sullen band
of cloud is louring in the West—
a low forehead, a corrugated frown.
Behind it comes the cold drop of frost
and autumn’s first hard night.

Corrugator—the tightening band
over the forehead’s bone,
the ‘muscle of difficulty,’
of concentration, effort, of leaning in
to frigid wind.

I lean into this coming season
of difficulty, when the sun
will struggle to raise its head
above the angle of sunset,
its bleak obliquity.

November’s forehead wears
scoured furrow, tension.
Forgets joy, the orbicular crinkle
of eye, those other muscles
to be strengthened.

I think of squinting into the ache
of snow, corrugated tracks.
Facing into November, I find it
difficult to anticipate
consolations—

the warmth of small, enclosed spaces,
the candles of memory
at its center. How can this ever be
enough? I fear too much.
The losses. Isolation.

– Alice Major

What life looks like these days

Bright. Beautiful. Big.

Our days are full of adventures -> in a new place -> in a new language -> in the heat -> in fields -> in forests . . .

And I couldn’t ask for much more than that right now.

“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)” – e. e. Cummings

[Photos: Around Letang, Nepal//Grace Farson]

PA road trip recap

A brief recap from our time together in Pennsylvania ->

We learned that we did not know our animals very well, we listened to this and our world was made bigger, we went hiking in the Catskills in NY, we laughed, *some of us cried, and we read poems in the car.

It was everything it could have been.

I’m in D.C. as I write this. I’m in a state of panic and praying that I can actually make my flight tonight. . .

Something will happen, good or bad and I am confident there is some sort of resolution . . . this always happens with big travels and sometimes I question why I like all this so much.

“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

– Matthew Arnold

[Photos: Union Dale, PA//Grace Farson]

All that is gold

I don’t even remember where I was when I took these, but I liked this place. I was outside of Jaisalmer in the Thar desert and other than that, I cannot tell you were these monuments were. . .

Today is filled with not so great news, but I feel that things are looking up. There is always something else, something more. . .and a good deal more to look forward to.

A shore of washed stones
A sky the color of stone
A stone cliff

Stony face, stony heart

There is nothing here,
Twisted roots, sea taking the land
Back. Sea wrack
And rain.
There is nothing
Here between us but stone.

One must learn to live with stone,
Make it a bed to lie on
A step to climb.

Carve.

– Kelly Cherry

[Photos: Gold somewhere in India//Grace Farson]

Bird in hand

The tiny wren perched on your hand
could be a key. Then
somewhere should be the door
that with a bird-shaped key-hole
cut by wind into stiff sand
must fit that needle beak and pinhead eye,
that tail’s armed signal to the clamped wings,
Fly! Spring the lock! Lift the floor
from the earth, the roof from the sky,
and with a fanfare of trills
—no trumpets, no veils—
reveal the Quaker heaven where this bird sings.

– Anne Stevenson

Happy Valentine’s Day world! On this day last year, I was distracted by thoughts // plans for Indonesia, studying things that didn’t matter much to me, and attempting to make sense of my life.

Today, I’m still trying to make sense of my life as well as thinking a lot about LOVE. Love is the first lesson we learn in life, but it’s also the hardest thing we ever attempt to understand. . .

I love that LOVE is complex. It’s universal and yet, it comes in so many shapes and sizes.

Today, on this happy Valentine’s Day, I am thinking about Nepal, new//exciting projects, and most of all LOVE.

What I <3 today:

+ Lulu Miller’s Radiolab piece on Love Letters

+ This fantastically Valentinesy video

+ This article on chocolate + your health

[Photos: A man I met in Jakarta, Indonesia who was in LOVE with a bird//Grace Farson]

Relentless Usurpation of Temporal Linearity

Back to it all.

First day of classes = something like this. . .

Woke up at 7:47 for my 8 a.m. // made it there + only 5 mins late // pjs = leggins + velvet shirt worn all day // new classes and faces all around// hugs // promises to see each other in the new semester// classes added//classes dropped//plans// people darting in and out of buildings trying to find classes// goodbyes//new connections made . . .

I had been continuing to do the same thing
while expecting different results.

On most days the children learned how
to do something. Time passed around us

as something approaching a figure eight
might move in order to let all else move

or be moved by our large numbers of feelings
exponentially on high alert once we let them register.

It passed us around. It passed around us like a river
around a boulder.

Music consisted of light & light came on time.
It was impossible for us not to anthropomorphize everything.

And yes, watching ice skaters, the kind called figure skaters,
the ones who aren’t doing anything other than tracking again &

again some figure of infinity marked out on ice for them,
this never failed to quiet us down & take us some place else.

– Dara Wier, 2012

[Photos: Holga, early spring, last year//Grace Farson]