My father and I in a cave somewhere in the Eastern US, 1984

this picture makes me so happy.

one more

wild geese

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 geese, 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

one day

the journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

-Mary Oliver

lay your sleeping head, my love

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

-W.H. Auden

me gusta ser una zorra

how fucking rad is this vid of sick female punk band Las Vulpes from Madrid? by the way in Spanish slang "zorra" means a slutty bitch. i told you it was radical.

yes,

"Okay, yes. Let's do this. Let's.



I feel ready. I am ready. I am unafraid. I've already thrown a lot of the past to the wind. Can't say I miss it. I am busy Being Present, like the Yogis. Not the ones who live in yellowstone National Park, though those are cute too. Yes, I can make these changes. I can accept these things. I want brilliant sacrafices, spectacular failures, sky-sized dreams, manic times again. I want newness. I am changing, different colors every second like a river in different times of day. I am ready to surprise myself. I am ready to love, but not the same things as before. I packed away many of those old tired out things, the silly vain dreams and boys who thought they wanted me without knowing what that was, people with too much to prove, myself, seven inches of my hair in a box smelling like gardenia, very victorian, nostalgia is very victorian and very magic but I am ready for new types of magic, potent and human. Beginning with me."

(i've been reading my old livejournal. this post was from September 18, 2006. i was 23.)

her look of indestructable youthfulness

Newland Archer observes his new wife:

"It was wonderful that–as he had learned in the Mission garden in St. Augustine–such depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of imagination. But he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him by dropping back into inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience had been eased of its burden; and he saw that she would probably go through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as it came, but never anticipating by so much as a stolen glance.
Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess. The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull , but only primitive and pure."
-The Age of Innocence

oh Edith. Is there anyone on earth who ever wrote like a tender laser? I have sometimes, when reading your words, the distinct image of you dressed in a blindingly white, carefully tucked lab coat and spectacles in that big house in New York state, leaning over a dead bluebird on a chipped china tea plate with a shining scapel in your be-ringed hands.

intimacy

I can be alone,
I know how to be alone.

There is a tacit understanding
between my pencils
and the trees outside;
between the rain
and my luminous hair.

The tea is boiling:
my golden zone,
my pure burning amber.

I can be alone,
I know how to be alone.
By tea-light,
I write.


- Nina Cassian
trans. from the Romanian
by Eva Feiler and Nina Cassian


(thanks emily.)

young girls

the future of photography belongs to 17 year old girls with internet connections.

fetie

eyul aslan

haskii

kata pult

laurence

that's my name

unrest-so so sick

being sick in the summer is not as fun as this. if only i had those sunglasses. then everything would be Different.

up in arms/up in your arms

if you don't allready love zine god Edie Fake then you should get on that stat. he also imprints your flesh with his beautiful creations, perhaps even mine own in the future if i am so lucky.

Rustic Rhubarb Tartlettes

Do you like rhubarb? Before this summer, I'd never touched the stuff, filing it in a category of unappealing comestibles that Southern people had an inexplicable fondness for, like okra, collard greens, and those omelets paula dean makes inside of plastic baggies. But then it showed up in our farm box, and not really knowing what to do with the pretty pink stalks besides propping them decoratively in a canning jar, I figured I might as well eat them as long as they were steeped with overgenerous heaps of sugar. Not feeling ambitious enough to make my own pie dough for a strawberry 'barb chess pie, I poked around a bit until I found something a little more up my alley: barely sweet, rustic, and yes oh yes easy corn-crust rhubarb mini-tarts. When "rustic" comes into play, you just know we're talking homely, ugly, misshapen, and utterly charming. Not to mention delicious, which these little monsters are; somewhere in between the taste of pecan pie (inexplicably, and wonderfully) and a corn biscuit slathered with homemade preserves, these tarts are easy-going enough to serve at tea time or as a dinner party dessert, though I think they taste best eaten standing up at the fridge, out of a square of parchment paper, in the middle of a hot July night when nothing else will do . And just like that, I found myself craving . . . . rhubarb.

recipe here.

Notes:
-I used a real bourbon vanilla bean. you should too, don't think you can get away with any of that vanilla extract stuff, you joker.

-Corn flour was a little tricky to find, but if your grocery sells Bob's Red Mill, you should be able to find it with the other esoteric flours and spelts.

love,love,love

lil stevie kane

feel joy