gold yet untitled

“Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know. Out of our longing for meaning came all of art: out of our longing for truth all science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names–Susan Cain calls it ‘the bittersweet’ and Portuguese has the lovely word saudade; the vague, constant longing for something or someone beyond the horizon of reality–but we recognize it in our marrow, in the strata of the soul beyond the reach of words.”

“It is so lonely to feel deeply about the world and be met with the complete failure of language to communicate it. Poetry gets us marginally (but importantly!) closer than rhetorical language, like how standing on a roof gets one a few feet closer to grabbing a star than standing in the dirt. It makes the loneliness of being here a little easier to bear.”

“When you are investigating language, you are investigating people. Language has no existence apart from the people who speak it. To get to know a language, you have to get to know the people. There is no other way.”

Sun, in this life, I will be your daughter and you will teach me how to run.

“But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal.”

“…your fingerprints all over the thing that changed my mind, that made me better than I was. Come love, make me better than I was. Come teach me a kinder way to say my own name.”