lovingword

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“To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.”

Barbara Brown Taylor

“Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find…meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that creme caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way.”

Joan Didion

“At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental. It is the sad tendency of domesticity—as of piety—to contract and of grace to decay into rigor and peace into tedium.”

Marilynne Robinson

“I think it’s that—of course, we all have problems tidying our homes, but it’s not just that… We all have clutter in our hearts and that’s what needs tidying.”

Marie Kondo, Interview with Stephen Colbert

“Often he was struck by a sensation—which he had experienced at Lispenard street as well—that they were playing house, that he was living some boyhood fantasy of running away from the world and it’s rules with his best friend and living in some unsuitable but perfectly commodious structure (a train car; a tree house) that wasn’t meant to be a home but had become one because of its occupants’ shared conviction to make it so.”

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Domesticity is very sacred to me. Making a home is…it’s just, like, the central thing in my life. When I cannot make a home, even in a hotel room, I feel really lost. Putting everything in a certain place on purpose. Not just, like, throwing shit down. But putting everything in a certain place on purpose and starting to sort of figure out how the trains run, basically. Like, what are the paths? What are the paths in the house that you’re going to take the most and what can you line those paths with? Or, in the hotel room, like, where are you going to put your journal and your book, so that you’re just starting to create little pathways so that you’re just starting to make pathways in this little garden and that they mark that space? I just take it really seriously. it’s sort of like…it’s so sweet, it’s sort of like when you see children playing a game and you know they’re marking out a world. And they’re like ‘this is where the dungeon is! And this is where the kitchen is in the castle! And this is where the-‘ And you can’t see anything but the backyard but they can see everything. That’s what I’m doing and I’m doing it all the time. All the time. And it’s always there. Even when I get into the car, I think about where I’m sitting and how I’m sitting and what I’m touching. And I just try hard to do that.”

Jenny Slate

“He baked cakes with golden syrup, could sew a button by hand, braid hair into tight plaits that wouldn’t come loose and recall a variety of old-fashioned homeopathic cures—cinnamon toast for a stomach ache, a nip of brandy for a cough. He showed me love as an act of daily care; but safety, as my father and [Marilynne] Robinson knew, can’t be assured by domestic rituals. No amount of starch or shoe polish can stop a life from coming apart or guarantee that the ones we love will always stay with us, within an arm’s reach. Yet still we sweep the floors and wash the sheets and hang them out in the sunlight. All this, like a sprinkling of salt around our boundaries, a spell to protect ourselves against abandonment, separation, loss. What else is housekeeping but a kind of magical thinking, a wish against the things we fear the most?”

Madelaine Lucas

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Mieko Kawakami, from 'Heaven'

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Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days

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Clarice Lispector, from “That’s Where I’m Going”, Soulstorm: Stories (tr. Alexis Levitin)

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I thought I had been surviving, and yet, what I was really doing was hanging by a string, loosely holding myself from collapsing. I was always on the verge, and I could feel that friction in my soul.

Fariha Róisín, from Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

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Ritual Is Journey, Chris Abani

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In the grand scheme of things, none of this matters much, and I am going to make it matter even less by moving on and making something good out of something so bad.

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i remember the feeling of teenage obsession, and i miss it desperately. few things about our everyday lives are more genuinely magical to me than the way that loving something with commitment can rewire your understanding of time: instead of dates or semesters, i can place moments of my early life inside the year where i only read vonnegut, the month i first loved the smiths, the autumn i spent with that rilke poem. it manages to make time physical — it turns it into something that can be tasted and touched. i want my life to be textured by the periods i spent perfecting a stone fruit hot honey cake or watching murder mysteries. wouldn’t it be wonderful to one day taste a cake and remember how you felt in september? i have many criticisms of rapid-fire, non-stop consumption, but none are so personal to me as this: when we submit to a cultural landscape that tells us to never stop looking for the new shiniest thing, we lose a kind of language for understanding ourselves and others. loving is a muscle that’s been strategically atrophied by a culture of manic consumption and constant availability.

- rayne fisher-quann

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Danez Smith, “I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense”

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“Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.”

—Corrie ten Boom

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Pain, late night perambulations, and poverty – Pizarnik believed these were the roots of lasting art. She gambled her health and well-being against her poetry and the mysteries of language.

Patricio Ferrari, from the introduction to ‘The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik’

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Noel Coward, The New Faber Book of Love Poems; from ‘Any Little Fish', ed. James Fenton

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pink in the night

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“He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.”

— Ernest Hemingway, from The Old Man and the Sea (via firstfullmoon)

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— “Love Letter (Clouds)”, Sarah Manguso

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Hammond B3 Organ Cistern by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

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“tell me what you loved, touched, wondered: did you dream? did you stare at your own reflection? an aching to sliver between the fluttering colors of her consciousness, the human of her, to know her ripest and most shiny parts, for her to hold my face close, spill her metallic language into me until i recognize that i am of her, and she of me:”

— Lucy Seward, from “Santa Zitae, Virgine Luc.” Amethyst Review (29 March 2023)