Music is the space between the notes

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
 

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Image: David Hurn, Cactus nursery, Arizona
Title: Claude Debussy

The past and the future pressing so hard on either side

My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.

-Clarice Lispector
 
Image: Kerry Murray, Penhas Douradas, Serra da Estrela
Title: Evelyn Waugh

Something Godlike: Both Tree and Center

 











I was left behind with the immensity of existing things…a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

-Czesław Miłosz

Image: Peter Keetman, Projektion, 1953
Title: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams

The language of the road

"The ocean ends, like life and vision, at a horizon that is the fault of the curvature of eye and earth, with no proof of true end at all." -Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary

Image: Found, Marble paper 
Title: from Mohammed Bennis’s Seven Birds

A Word

I used to think when I turned thirty I would become a writer.

Thirty passed.

I wrote here then, daily. Poems. Essays. Words like leaves on a page curling, turning over in the wind.

I wrote before that, too. Decades before: shelves, walls, boxes of words.

I didn't know what blogger meant. Monetize, followers, trolls.

And then erasure happened.

It swept.

My knees became my feet, my eyes like the closing flowers, unseen.

I have dwelt in caves dripping.

Time has passed. The sun is higher.

I write.
I want you to know I am still writing.

Yes, my answer will always be yes,

I am writing.

Image: John Bridges, Embrace
Text: Terresa Wellborn