“We break so we can take in aliveness and we dissolve so we can be taken in.” ~ Mark Nepo, from “Hearing the Cries of the World”

Two Good Reads:

via: parabola-magazine

“That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.”

~ Mark Nepo, from “Hearing the Cries of the World”

Read Nepo’s essay here.

Photography Credit: Fernando Lemos

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via The Atlantic:

“I know my obsession with Lea is partly selfish. Her story is like a hologram. Tilt it, let the light hit it from a different angle, and the dead girl we’re talking about is me. We’d both gotten cited by police at 14 for drinking beer on the beach. At the height of our friendship I matched her drink for drink, inhale for inhale. If I’d had a little less luck, or she’d had a little more—how would this story go? In my memory, yes, I’m the sidekick, yes, she was the one always egging us to take one more step into the shadows, where we could really get hurt. But wasn’t I holding her hand, encouraging her with my willingness to follow? One night, while we laid outside in the field, a little tipsy, she grabbed my arm and made me promise her I’d never let her turn out like a druggie girl who lived in the rundown apartment complex behind my house. I promise, I told her. I promise.”

~ Julie Buntin, “She’s Still Dying on Facebook”

Read Buntin’s article here.

“Any unfolding is an | unfolding into light, that unlocked origami of the light—the light slowly | lining again those faces, those facets, of our yet unfolding story. ~ David St. John, from “XI. The Aurora of the Midnight Ink”

Reblogged from parabola-magazine

Don’t Go Back To Sleep

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn’t decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

~ Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks from The Essential Rumi

Photograph: Minor White, Window Sill and Reflection, 1958

Music by The Notwist, “Consequence”

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“No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” ~ William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Reblogged from Parabola Magazine:

                   

How do you know but every Bird
that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight,
clos’d by your senses five?

~ William Blake (“A Memorable Fancy” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Photograph: Yvon [Pierre Yves Petit, 1886-1969] : Gargoyle atop Notre Dame

                   

Music by Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo, “This is How it’s Meant to be”