and there was an oak tree

Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa. Marilynne Robinson, Home

Photo: Kansas City School Board Meeting, Mike Sinclair

via From the Desk of

let's dance

put on your red shoes and dance the blues

Photo: Hadnet Tesfai, Freunde von Freunden

the past

is always conversing with the future. Siddartha Mukherjee

like comedy, like sex, like anything

“Don’t you think like most things, like comedy, like sex, like anything, it’s about timing? I think we collided with each other,” she adds, referring to her husband. Cate Blanchett

Painting: Administrative Building, 1964 Gerhard Richter

reprise: the kiss

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing." Sylvia Plath

Photo from The Selby.

the changes we want

"It's never the changes we want that change everything." The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

Photo from the ue

i could do ten sometimes

Interviewer: You said you were writing eight hours a day.

Franzen: I could do ten sometimes.

Interviewer: Even when things weren't working?

Franzen: I didn't have the experience of things not working. I didn't know enough to know when something wasn't all that good. The chapters just came clattering out.

Jonathan Franzen, The Art of Fiction No. 207, Paris Review

Painting: Eric Fischl, Barbecue, 1982

i lost the ability to imagine

loving anyone but you.

Photo by Foster Huntington from Restless Transplant

wild and constant

Sometimes at night
when I can’t sleep

because of the wind
I go and stand
in the library of glaciers.

I stand in another world.
Not the past not the future.
Not paradise not reality not

a dream.
An other competence.
Wild and constant.

From "Wildly Constant," Anne Carson via Books vs. Cigarettes

Painting: I.G., Gerhard Richter, 1993

me too

I swooned.

Anja in Honey Dress, Filly Designs
Thanks to Darling Dexter