Spencer Finch - 366, Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year (2009)

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is...

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

~ Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

This Is Why album tracklist with pictures

Richard Hugo, Essay on Poetic Theory: The Triggering Town

Again with the “can’t.”

somedays my heart feels so close to the surface like it wants to take me somewhere and is tired of the limitations of my body, of my feet always walking in the wrong direction. this isn’t really an original thought. i have told you this before. someone almost loved me and they come to me in dreams even now but i punish my daytime mind for any thoughts of soccer or duvet covers or carrot cake and i never think about him except when it is dark out and i am in the backseat of the car and no one can see the alternate life passing through me, the one where he laughs forever and i press my ear as close as i can because i am tired of the limitations of my body. someday things will be different. the losses will fall off of me like particles from another world, landing on a small unsuspecting planet. i will garden and have at least one big window where i can see the sky and have the good sense to look. but today i asked God to empty my heart of whatever wasn’t meant for it and he is still in there somewhere, occupying a small space in a big way. if i let myself reach out to touch it then i would probably find out that there’s small space inside of him too that flinches when he looks at the moon. of course it doesn’t help to know that. it doesn’t help to know that the dark sky is a cauldron we both sit in to punish ourselves for the life we didn’t have.

“If you’re reading this, if there’s air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories aren’t finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going.”

— Jamie Tworkowski

— Elena Ferrante, from “The Days of Abandonment.”

“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?”

— Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country