"Hold on, Hold on"

She told him a story about a man and woman. And a note scrawled onto a photograph. And the lesson she learned: the secret to making a decision is to make it at the right time. "It must be made in the precise moment that you already know the answer because you've already decided. Then, simply do it. Otherwise the decision makes itself."

Perhaps it was also like this.

“Yet to die. Unalone still.”

By Osip Mandelstam
 

Translated By John High and Matvei Yankelevich

 

Yet to die. Unalone still.

For now your pauper-friend is with you.

Together you delight in the grandeur of the plains,

And the dark, the cold, the storms of snow.

Live quiet and consoled

In gaudy poverty, in powerful destitution. 

Blessed are those days and nights.  

The work of this sweet voice is without sin.   

Misery is he whom, like a shadow,   

A dog’s barking frightens, the wind cuts down.   

Poor is he who, half-alive himself   

Begs his shade for pittance. 

January 15-16, 1937

Source: Poetry (April 2009).

Poetry takes over your dreams

“It is difficult to imagine the degree to which people lived then in the shadow of poetry. It was a frenzied passion, another way of being, a fireball that went everywhere on its own. We would open the paper, even the business section or the legal page, or we would read the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup, and there was poetry waiting to take over our dreams.”

~ Gabriel García Márquez, from Living to Tell the Tale

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

WHEN YOU ARE OLD
by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

HEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

 

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

 

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

"When You Are Old" is reprinted from The Rose. W.B. Yeats. 1893.

Happy Birthday to Stephen Fry

Thank you for being so adorable!

Surrender

There is no painless path to soul consciousness.

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

(260)

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there's a pair of us!

Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know! 

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –   

To tell one's name – the livelong June –  

To an admiring Bog!

~ Emily Dickinson