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“He knows how to think things out. But he makes his best discoveries without thinking.”

- Alan Watts, “Seeing Through the Net”

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“He communicates his daze like a mime plotting his gradual retreat from performing, not because his star is fading but because his fate, his exquisite alienation, is sealed.”

- Harmony Holiday on James Baldwin, “For Those Who Would Be Real”

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“I believe one only needs a moment, one breathe, to fulfill your destiny, because time is relative”

- Tertia’s comment

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“She luxuriated in a bohemian life, as the poet Diane di Prima would later write, of ‘laughter, the silliness and glee unscrutinized, one’s blood running strong and red in one’s veins.’”

- Susannah Cahalan on Rosemary Woodruff, The Acid Queen

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“We walk a magic carpet which, as we move, unrolls.

Thus the surprises, thus the continuity.”

- M.C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

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“Everett has climbed into Twain’s dream and dreamed it with him. Dreamed the same dream differently. And now the dream is altered.

Is that what a real myth is, a dream that runs along beneath the dreamers, like a river? Some voice goes on insisting that we are on this raft together.”

- John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Twain Dreams: The enigma of Samuel Clemens”

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Born just to know things, then to take off

….

Born just to grow wings, then to take off

- Lael Neale, “Blue Vein”

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In you is the illusion of each day.

You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.

You undermine the horizon with your absence.

Eternally in flight like the wave.

- Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

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Our job is to taste free air. Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall, but, my friends, the hour is yours.

- Severance

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“She was the sacred place on the road of life”

- Edward Gwynn translating the Dindshenchas (in reference to Tara)

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“…that they may face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet.”

Black Elk as translated by John G. Neihardt

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People bore his other self. He lives in two worlds, Syria and America, and is at home in neither. He is free only when alone. With more people he must wear seventy veils. With me even he must wear two; if he wears only one, he shocks me.

- Mary Haskell, Beloved Prophet

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“When the Light Appears” by Allen Ginsberg

You'll bare your bones you'll grow you'll pray you'll only know

When the light appears, boy, when the light appears

You'll sing & you'll love you'll praise blue heavens above

When the light appears, boy, when the light appears

You'll whimper & you'll cry you'll get yourself sick and sigh

You'll sleep & you'll dream you'll only know what you mean

When the light appears, boy, when the light appears

You'll come & you'll go, you'll wander to and fro

You'll go home in despair you'll wonder why'd you care

You'll stammer & you'll lie you'll ask everybody why

You'll cough and you'll pout you'll kick your toe with gout

You'll jump you'll shout you'll knock you're friends about

You'll bawl and you'll deny & announce your eyes are dry

You'll roll and you'll rock you'll show your big hard cock

You'll love and you'll grieve & one day you'll come believe

As you whistle & you smile the lord made you worthwhile

You'll preach and you'll glide on the pulpit in your pride

Sneak & slide across the stage like a river in high tide

You'll come fast or come on slow just the same you'll never know

When the light appears, boy, when the light appears

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“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

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“It was a time of great hope and great expectation; it was also a time of great waste. That is history.”

- Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s”

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I say to you, dear artist, there is no such thing as symmetry. There is no such thing as one look in the eye. There is no such thing as a single smirk. There is no such thing as ears that hear everything.

Instructions to you, dear artist, draw me with rolls of flesh and bags under my eyes.

Collage on an eye from my mother, the lips of my father, the look of “here we all are in this shit” of my brothers.

I want you to carefully pick out the shade of my hair. Use yellow crayons, but also blue and red. I’m pretty sure you will want to make my bangs green to vibe with the red of my face. The alizarin crimson of my forehead, nose and cheeks. The fuchsia of my lips.

My eyes will rest one on top of the other. Don’t forget my mother’s eye, clipped out of a photograph of her taken November 22, 1978. The day I was born.

The eyes, the ones you draw are blue. The whole eye, blue. The almond shape, the iris shape, the pupil shape. Blue. Smear downward like tears, like devastation. Then fill them in with grey to cover up what they have seen.

Dear artist you should know that I have a tattoo of a two faced girl on my arm. I want you to trace that and put it on the t-shirt I wear.

My skirt is a black upside-down triangle. My feet are black sock-like shoes.

In my arms I hold my cat. She has the look on her face that says, ‘I liked being held until one second ago.’

On the wall behind me is the illustration Rhonda did of me and Kris on the day we eloped. That will be photoshopped in.

There is a table behind me on which sits a Harvest Lumber Company hat and a pair of handlebars.

One of my eyes is looking at the door.

- Sara Kate Hannon

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You left me, sweet, two legacies,—

A legacy of love

A Heavenly Father would content,

Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain

Capacious as the sea,

Between eternity and time,

Your consciousness and me.

- Emily Dickinson