Love

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 

For the ends of being and ideal grace. 

I love thee to the level of every day's 

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. 

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. 

I love thee with the passion put to use 

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, 

I shall but love thee better after death.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I open at the close

- Grant Snider

Matters of heart

- "I just want to find out if she is OK."
- "Of course she is not. What kind of question is that??!!"
-"She is a human traffic accident and everybody's looking at the wreckage. She is doing the best she can with what she has left."

- "I know I know. I wish......I want to be able to help her someway."
- "You can not. No one can. You can not mend a broken heart. At best, you can distract it. She has a long life to live, constantly searching for distraction."

Bequeath

No pictures, no remains,
No memories to remind us
of each other.

She walked away leaving,
a blue imprint
on my existence.

Its the chase

I’ve flown kites. Sometimes they’re gone forever, and sometimes they’re just waiting in the middle of the road for you to rescue them. Kites can be vivacious or they can be stubborn. I’ve had both kinds, and a vivacious kite is definitely worth chasing for. 

Conversations of Wonderland

- “If you could be anywhere right now, where would you be?” she asked.

- “Alaska” he said immediately.

- “Alaska? What’s in Alaska?” 

- “The sky.”

- “We have sky here, too.” she motioned to the blue expanse above their heads. “A whole stretch of it, right in front of you.”

- “Yeah, but the sky in Alaska is bigger, closer,” he said with an edge of impatience; she got the sense he didn’t like her insistence that they change the subject. “Like the heavens are sitting on your doorstep, and going for a stroll among the clouds is entirely plausible, if you felt so inclined.”

- His description of Alaska had her smiling. “I had no idea you liked the sky so much.”

-“I do. I do like the sky. I like looking up and being surprised by what I see. It doesn’t happen too often, but when it does . . .” he paused, “when it does I’m usually in Alaska.”

I value..

- Grant Snider

Waiting for forever

I am here,

Standing at the corner of the world,

Waiting to never be found. 

Can I ever be found, 

Is a question that stays with me.

On the day.

"She was barely awake and I was barely asleep.
She listened to me think, and I listened to her dream.
She didn't know what I was afraid of, I was afraid of me.
That I might push her away, like a nightmare does a dream."

-mvDL

In perpetual night

- "You look fine to me."

- “I'm anything but fine. I feel like the sun has set and not risen in days."

- E.L.J.

Departures

"You never think the last time's going to be the last time, you think there will be more. You think you'll have forever, but sometimes you don't."

Here lies memories of 'Eti'. The girl with long fingers. - xXoO

Words from the storyteller

My child, I know you are not a child
But I see you running wild
Between those flowering trees.
Your sparkling dreams, your silver laugh

Your wishes to the stars above
Are just my memories.
And in your eyes the ocean
And in your eyes the sea

The waters frozen over
With your longing to be free.

Yesterday you'd awoken
To a world incredibly old.
This is the age you are broken
Or turned into gold.

I didn't say the world was good.
I hoped by now you understood
Why I could never lie.
I didn't promise you a thing.
Don't ask my winter voice for spring
Just spread your wings and fly.

Though in the hidden garden
Down by the green green lane
The plant of love grows next to
The tree of hate and pain.

So take my tears as a token.
They'll keep you warm in the cold.
This is the age you are broken
Or turned into gold.

You've lived too long among us
To leave without a trace
You've lived too short to understand
A thing about this place.

Some of us here just sit smoking
And some are already sold.
This is the age you are broken
Or turned into gold...

-  Antonia Michaelis

Dream within a dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream; 

Yet if hope has flown away 

In a night, or in a day, 

In a vision, or in none, 

Is it therefore the less gone? 

All that we see or seem 

Is but a dream within a dream. 

I stand amid the roar 

Of a surf-tormented shore, 

And I hold within my hand 

Grains of the golden sand 

How few! yet how they creep 

Through my fingers to the deep, 

While I weep--while I weep! 

O God! can I not grasp 

Them with a tighter clasp? 

O God! can I not save 

One from the pitiless wave? 

Is all that we see or seem 

But a dream within a dream? 

- Edgar Allan Poe 

Perception

It was almost midnight. The crown prince and his adviser took a break from the paperwork to get fresh air.

Adviser commented - “Ah, so that’s what the moon looks like from the palace.”  The Prince scoffs that the moon is the same , not seeing any difference.

Adviser explained that when he was young, he lived with a theater group. He traveled with his performance troupe extensively, his home was on wheels. He’d thought that the moon looked different in every region—full in one area, crescent-shaped in another and some regions do not have a moon. He was not at the same place long enough to realize that moon changes everyday, and is same everywhere. Laughing at his childhood foible, he asks if the prince has ever entertained totally wrong ideas as a child? , to which the Prince said -

"I was even more foolish than you. When I was a child, I thought this palace was the whole world. I was born and bought up in the east wing of the palace, roaming to west quarters was an adventure for me. My naive head couldn't imagine that there can be other people and many other things outside these walls."

Hey there Clementine

I cried on your shoulder silently through the tragedies. Sadly, You are someone I try to reach more when in pain than in happiness. But also with you, I can talk about the shape of a cumulus cloud, about the song of a thought, or how it reminds me of a person or a moment in past, about a scene in a movie or a quote of a book and about how it made me feel, while I was coming back home this evening, the setting sun made the road look like it was on fire.

Who else would know what this all means? All the magical moments of my life, all the misfortunes I went through.

To the end of the line

Out beyond the ideas of
wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field.
I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about

language, ideas, even the phrase 'each other',

doesn't make any sense.

- J M Rumi

Stuff in the box

I wonder why I still have them.
that dried flower in the book,
the pass for a concert,
a worn out train ticket,
that one restaurant bill,
a deep red pebble,
a green frog pencil cap,
the note from my birthday,
or that picture inside the envelope.
Why did I keep them,
through places to places?
I want to know what to do,
with all these dead things I carry.

On friendship's day

One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.

- John O’Donohue

Drought and Rain

“Suddenly this defeat,

this Rain.

The blues gone gray,

And the browns gone gray,

And yellow,

a terrible amber. 

I have been easy with trees 

too long. 

Too familiar with mountains. 

Joy has been a habit. 

Now Suddenly 

this Rain.” 

― Jack Gilbert

Efforts to live an ordinary real life.

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.
'When you are real you don’t mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' the Rabbit asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn’t happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.'

- The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery William