Was standing about a foot from this last night

Friday night could not be more perfect. 

Happy weekend, lovelies!

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild gees, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

I can't stop listening to the age of adz. I know its all indie to be into it, and hipster to avoid it, but for the moment i'm too swept off into the magic of his sound to care. it gives rainy days their wimsy and nights their seriousness tenderness.

I want to run away to the land above (pics from here)

listen to this and have a wonderfully wet wednesday

 above: things that are talking to me. I'm fascinated by people's odds and ends...

The earth braces itself for the feet

Of a lover of God about to 

Dance.

The sky becomes very timid

When a great saint starts waving his arms

In joy,

For the sky knows its prized fixtures,

The sun, moon and planets

Could all wind up

Rolling so wild on the floor!

...

The day candle (sun) has forgotten the hour;

The whole world has gone joyously mad.

- Hafiz

I'm avoiding school with pure determination right now. After writing the most intense paper of my life, I deserve some pause to breath! And what air today! My windows are frosted with condensation and teary pathways, giving me streaky sights to the heavy trees outside. I'm completely in love with everything sweatery and especially anything indian/aztec-y. If only this life of a poor student wasn't so textile deprived!

sound of my soul: here

this time is
of barbed quiet wound tight across our shivering skin.
of senseless air
and meaning dies quietly, dressed to the nines and alone.
I shouldn't mourn past selves and smiles
but how can I not feel their betrayal to the past
with sadness, washed and folded, weeping in its bottom drawer.

The sound of my sinking exhausted world to be found here (be sure to listen to all three parts). I found this info on wiki particularly effecting: In interviews, Stevens has stated that, in 2009/10, he suffered from a mysterious debilitating virus infection that affected his nervous system. He experienced chronic pain, and was forced to stop working on music for several months. He said: "The Age of Adz, is, in some ways, a result of that process of working through health issues and getting much more in touch with my physical self. That's why I think the record's really obsessed with sensation and has a hysterical melodrama to it."

The fall is painfully beautiful outside today. The colors are so vivid, I feel like I'm in a fevered state of consciousness, perhaps not helped by listening to sufjan 24/7 on no sleep.

come closer.
come into this. come closer.
you are quite the beauty. if no one has ever told you that before know that now. you are quite the beauty. there is joy in how your mouth dances with your teeth. your mouth is a sign of how sacred your life truly is. come into this. true of heart come into this. you are true of heart. come closer. come closer. know that whatever God prays to He asked it to help Him make something of worth. He woke from His dreams scraped the soil form the spaces inside Himself made you and was happy. you make the Lord happy.
come into this.
come closer.
know that something softer than us but just as holy planted the pieces of Himself into our feet that we might one day find our way back to Him. you are almost home.
come closer come into this. there are birds beating their wings beneath your breastplate gentle sparrows aching to sing come aching hearts come soldiers of joy doormen of truth come true of heart come into this.
my heart was too big for my body so I let it go and most days this world has thinned me to where I am just another cloud forgetting another flock of swans but believe me when I tell you my soul has squeezed into narrow spaces. place your hand beneath your head when you sleep tonight and you may find it there making beauty as we sleep as we dream as we turn over when I turn over in the ground may the ghosts that I have asked answers of do the turning kneading me into crumbs of light and into this thing love thing called life. come into it!
come you wooden museums
you gentle tigers
negro farces in two broken scenes.
come rusting giants!
I see teacups in your smiles upside down glowing. your hands are like my heart. on some days how it trembles. let us hold them together. I am like you. I too at times am filled with fear. but like a hallway must find the strength to walk through it. walk through this with me. walk through this with me. through this church birthed of blood and muscle where every move our arms take every breath we swallow is worship.
bend with me. there are bones in our throats. if we choke it is only on songs.


- Anis Mojgani

I could listen to this all day long. And To Have and Have Not is officially the best movie of all time! Its been a week of inbetweeness and a sort of suspended sense of now....pushing to finish school assignments and work, fighting a cold that triumphed in the end.

but there is life after a headcold!

And Sufjan Stevens on Friday.

I think I need ink on my hands again to remember how to breath. If only there were time for figure drawing in all this chaos of a fall.

Wistful ones,
A tired hello before I hit the pillow.

MAGIC to be found here.

I miss Heaney this fall, and Rilke. There is no time, when Huizinga's seven thousand sources invade my days. Freedom finished. Quite brilliant, but not an easy read.

My brain is no longer forming words, so goodnight, city. This overworked student is headed for slumber.

All I Ever Needed Help With Was You

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

I've lost my T.S.E. and its making me lonely. Rarely do I misplace books important as he is. As it is Saturday I am again writing, though the moment isn't very inspirational. Overworked would be the word I think, and under-eye dark-worry (can you tell I've been reading Anglosaxon? The kennings just keep coming....and alliteration, too, apparently).
Things I'm in love with:
food. pretty much any kind, because there is very little time, I've discovered, to fit it in between running five blocks to class (hefting a hundred-pound bag in the process), running five blocks back again, seven blocks sideways to honors (which involves demonstrating your smarts, preferably at highly audible tones for the benefit of your presumably deprived classmates), and then shimmying into business attire for evenings of semi-exhaustion as a fairy-tale (according to the oregonian - something I would have to contest. if you saw the amount of work involved you would agree with me) librarian.

Brits. They are quite lovely and well educated. And who else, when speaking of an author, would murmur confidingly to you over a dusty book, "mad as toast!"

Tender Loving Empire - discovered in the same week by myself, walking by it in downtown ptown, and also by a friend online. Oh Portland. Thank you for a having a real live etsy shop.

New Pornographers. I know its old news to all you young indies, and yes Sufjan Stevens has a new album out, but how can anyone tire of listening to this? It gets me through my many many hours of life right now.

It is way too late for me to be typing on here and not reading Montaigne or Huizinga or unknown Anglosaxon poets, so farewell my lovelies until next time.