#even the goldfinch reread is on pause

[otrtbs]

nat nat nat what are you reading right now

i feel like this is definitely in the context of fanfics but the answer is im reading a fuckton (standard unit of measurement yk) of art history articles for class 😭😵‍💫 i dont really have time for much of anything else atm

[disjunkt]

Yesterday IT came to set up a computer in a new single office for a co-worker who has returned after long absence. After they had finished, I went downstairs to see whether everything was in order. When I opened the door, for a moment, it felt as if I were standing in one of the most beautiful video game sceneries in my memory, as if this dear memory had come to life somehow.

In Terranigma, the Earth is a hollow sphere, divided into the surface world and the under world, Lightside and Darkside. The under world, your home and the only world you have known, is a frozen wasteland, crystal mountains and rivers of magma hostile to life. On your solitary quest to resurrect the planet, you first traverse this dark, empty space to resurrect the long submerged continents. Then, leaving everything (someone) you have loved behind, you ascend to the surface. You awake to see: There is nothing waiting for you but devastated wasteland. Stale air. No plants, no animals, no humans. No life. A different kind of desolation, or perhaps just more of the same.

Alone, you crawl through a dark underground cavern, and eventually remove the parasite from the Ra Tree, thus restoring life to all plants. (There’s this beautiful, poetic video of nature coming back to the planet, imbuing the barren land with green.) The darkness lifts, clean air fills your lungs, and you find yourself in the scenery of the video above:

Grass beneath your feet, flowers sprouting where you step, eager to greet you, thank you, tell you their story, flowers singing for you to express their gratitude (and the music changes as the world is filled with their tender song), clear water enveloping all of it. You find that there is so much that nature has to tell you if you are willing to pause and listen. Such as that small red flower: You will no longer be alone. We will always watch over you. (They will continue to watch over you even after you have lost the voice to converse with nature. [I can’t believe that post has been on my mind for seven years already?!])

When I opened the door to the new office yesterday, expecting, aside from black hardware, nothing but sterile and empty white, I was greeted with the sight of two beautiful plants that I had not seen before, and that said co-worker must have brought from home. He’s... not a tender person, neither in appearance, behaviour nor language (that is not to say he can’t be tender), and not someone I would associate with plants or tending. In the background, I could hear water quietly flowing through the pipes, unlike on the floor above – and for a moment, I thought I heard birdsong. (The next station on Ark’s journey in Terranigma after Evergreen is Bird Sanctuary.) The unexpectedness of all of this made it feel as though I had stepped into the paradise above, and even though the surprise and the moment flashed by, in that moment, time seemed to stand still.

And it made me think of two poems of immense strength, and of immense comfort, that I had read and reread in the past week:

At the end of my suffering there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice:

from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.

— Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

Oh do you have time to linger for just a little while out of your busy

and very important day for the goldfinches that have gathered in a field of thistles

for a musical battle, to see who can sing the highest note, or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth, or the most tender? Their strong, blunt beaks drink the air

as they strive melodiously not for your sake and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning but for sheer delight and gratitude – believe us, they say, it is a serious thing

just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world. I beg of you,

do not walk by without pausing to attend to this rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something. It could mean everything. It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote: You must change your life.

— Mary Oliver, Invitation