words and ideas can change the world

"that's a beautiful question-and one i think we must navigate for the rest of our creative lives. i wonder if balance is possible, but i think in attempting it, we begin to parse out who we are, what made us, where we are going-all of which are means toward self-knowledge. i think that's what a novel is, at its core, one person trying to know themselves so throughly that they realize, in the end, it was the times they lived in, the people they touched and learned from, that made them real."

first of all: happy belated birthday <3 i think you might really enjoy reading rebecca solnit's hope in the dark and maya angelou's letter to my daughter <3

Joanna Newsom, Esme

“And when you fail, and are defeated and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing – instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)

“…you feel that you are always in a state of waiting, expecting some event, not on the outside, but inside you, in your guts. it is a condition that could be called cloudiness. you do not know if you are in rain or in sunshine. and darkness no longer becomes darkness, but a climb toward the threshold of an internal light that is just about to glow. this is when it becomes possible to speak of the light of darkness as it would be possible to speak of the darkness of light.”

Adonis, from Selected Poems; “Candlelight” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

“We talk so much of  light, please let me speak on behalf of  the good dark. Let us talk more of how dark the beginning of a day is.”

Maggie Smith, from “How Dark the Beginning”

"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand."

Rebecca Solnit, from her foreword to Hope in the Dark

more under cut:

I might be overshooting a bit here but I think I'd be Gaudi's Casa Batllo. I love Gaudi's architecture so much and it's one of the main reasons I want to travel to Barcelona, the other being Spain's incredible libraries (I'd especially love to visit the reading room in the Spanish Senate in Madrid). This particular building looks so haunting ("House of Bones") but it's colorful and ethereal and ancient. Casa Batllo is like if the movie Coraline was a building, and the building was a person, that person would be me.

Ode to the Phase Between Death and Rebirth by Ayesha

[Text: November is but another name for settling, like the frost does in the grass, like the snow does in window sills, like how the fog finds its way into every crevice the sun cannot touch, promises that someone sees it too, in spite of the absence of light.

November carries a blanket of weathered wool, lets the cold bite of it envelope the place your wings were severed from. 

It says, hush, child. Hush, I know. Your months of suffering have not gone unnoticed, I swear this to you as true as the sky is blue. But look, the geese have turned south. It is time you let your head down, too. Your neck must be weary of holding it so high, so proud and fixed in place by this cruel world’s unruly laws. Let the heat-risen, impossible

bruises leave your aching skin. I will ice them, even if I don’t carry no denouement. And she doesn’t. November doesn’t untie the knots in your plotline. She is just the precursor to hope.