If you want to be understood... listen

to live a life of only ease would not be a true human life. to live a human life, delicious and carving into you and filling you up, is to be touched by all things, to touch all things. to experience the depth of emotion, to be challenged, to grow, to fail and try again. to know multitudes and to be a contradiction.

some things can only be understood in contradictory terms and sometimes forcing clarity will simply not do

Une belle année est une année à perdre son temps

“desire is the first to be colonized and the last to be freed…”

“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.The possibility of life between us.”

Adrienne Rich, from On Lies, Secrets & Silence