Photograph by Andrew Querner

The archaeology of grief is not ordered.
It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten.
Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.
- Helen Macdonald

In Time

The night the world was going to end
when we heard those explosions not far away
and the loudspeakers telling us
about the vast fires on the backwater
consuming undisclosed remnants
and warning us over and over
to stay indoors and make no signals
you stood at the open window
the light of one candle back in the room
we put on high boots to be ready
for wherever we might have to go
and we got out the oysters and sat
at the small table feeding them
to each other first with the fork
then from our mouths to each other
until there were none and we stood up
and started to dance without music
slowly we danced around and around
in circles and after a while we hummed
when the world was about to end
all those years all those nights ago
- W.S. Merlin
(From The Pupil)

Oranges

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted –
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickel in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickel from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.
Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl’s hand
in mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

- Gary Soto

Narcissus

The Alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus.
The alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who knelt beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.
But this was not how the author of the book ended the story.
He said that when Narcissus died, the goddesses of the forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.
"Why do you weep?" the goddesses asked.
"I weep for Narcissus." the lake replied.
"Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus," they said, "for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand."
"But . . . was Narcissus beautiful?" the lake asked.
"Who better than you to know that?" the goddesses said in wonder. "After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!"
The lake was silent for some time. Finally, it said:
"I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful.
I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected."

"What a lovely story," the alchemist thought.

- Paulo Coelho
From The Alchemist

Life is Short

Life is short
and we have never too much time
for gladdening the hearts of those
who are travelling the dark journey with us.
Oh be swift to love,
make haste to be kind.

- Henri- Frédéric Ariel

Mullah Nasrudin was standing on the bank of a river, and watched as a dog came to drink.
The dog saw its reflection in the water and immediately began barking at it.
It barked until it was foaming at the mouth, and exhausted, fell into the river -
whereupon it quenched its thirst, climbed out, and happily walked away.
Nasrudin said,
"Thus I realized all my life I have been barking at my own reflection."

 - Sufi teaching story

Dear Edie

Dear Edie,

[…]
Hearing your voice at night over the phone, in a hotel where I’d gone to hide out to work, was like a strange and beautiful dream. You sounded warmer and more mature. You will always be a great woman.
I have a lot of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. 

It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.
Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all.

It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea.

 That which passes through everything, is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.

 The world you see is just a movie in your mind.

Your eternal old man,

- Jack Kerouac
From a letter to his former wife, Edie Kerouac Parker in January 1957 (a decade after their marriage had been annulled)

The Wave

The wave breaks
And I'm carried into it.
This is hell, I know,
Yet my father laughs,
Chest-deep, proving I'm wrong.
We're safely rooted,
Rocked on his toes.

Nothing irked him more
Than asking, "What is there
Beyond death?"
His theory once was
That love greets you,
And the loveless
Don't know what to say.
- Mark Jarman

From The Rote Walker

Mistake

For years I have seen
dead animals on the highway

and grieved for them
only to realize they are

not dead animals
they are t shirts

or bits of blown tire
and I have found

myself with this
excess of grief

I have made with
no object to let

it spill over and
I have not known

where to put it or
keep it and then today

 I thought I know
I can give it to you

- Heather Christle 

If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. 
They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. 
Still, that sense of the dangers in feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. 
Most of us do, in one way or another.

- Rebecca Solnit

Every breath taken in by the man

who loves, and the woman who loves,

goes to fill the water tank

where the spirit horses drink.

- Robert Bly

Perfect Song

I remember walking through the morning 
after a night of heavy snow and drink 
with headphones on and they played 
me the most perfect song: no one 
was awake and I was hungover 
young as clean as a piano 
I thought and at any moment 
someone might fall in love with me I was 
that woven into the electric 
cold bright air and for weeks 
after I went through the album 
in search of the song but could not 
find it and later much later I saw 
that what I had taken to be the song 
was in fact the joyous concordance of 
a moment that would not come again 

- Heather Christle

I don’t want your gratitude, I want your now.
I want the present forceful quality of your love.

- Anne Sexton
From A Self-Portrait in Letters

Your memory is a monster

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t.
It simply files things away.
It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—
and summons them to your recall with a will of its own.
You think you have a memory, but it has you.

- John Irving
From A Prayer for Owen Meany

The feelings that hurt most,
the emotions that sting most,
are those that are absurd–
The longing for impossible things,
precisely because they are impossible;
nostalgia for what never was;
the desire for what could have been;
regret over not being someone else;
dissatisfaction with the world’s existence.
All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness
create in us a painful landscape,
an eternal sunset of what we are.

- Fernando Pessoa
From The Book of Disquiet 

Life

Life should not be a journey to the grave
with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body,
but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke,
thoroughly used up,
totally worn out,
and loudly proclaiming
“Wow! What a Ride!”

– Hunter S. Thompson

Photograph by Deanna Templeton

Please allow me to wipe the slate clean. 
Age has no reality except in the physical world.
The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time.
Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say
that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. 
Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything,
but the alpha and omega.
An end in itself.

– Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Hope

“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

- Emily Dickinson

All I ever really want to know

All I ever really want to know
is how other people are making it through life—
where do they put their body, hour by hour,
and how do they cope inside of it.

- Miranda July

Day after Day

Day after day
I think of you as soon as I wake up. 
Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.

- Anne Carson
From Plainwater: Essays and Poetry