A Love Poem

“She was a beautiful dreamer. The kind of girl, who kept her head in the clouds, loved above the stars and left regret beneath the earth she walked on.”
                                               — Robert M Drake

Of Monsters and Men - Wild Roses (Official Lyric Video)

I will be the gladdest thing
    Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
    And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
    With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
    And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
    Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
    And then start down!  — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love feels small in stormy weather.

“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”
                   

                                    ― Siri Hustvedt

Loving your work is a joy.

“Do anything, but let it produce joy."

— Walt Whitman

Love. Love. Love. Longing.

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call saudade, an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration, and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world.

                                —  Nick Cave 

Love. Love. Love.

“It’s all messy: the hair, the bed, the words, the heart. Life” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love. Love. Love.

Things I Love. A night sky dotted with millions of stars Writing with a fountain pen on 100% cotton paper Tea with some sugar Warm breezes The sound of a bee buzzing on my flowers Books Flowers My lost boy.

Love. Love. Love.

I believe that love is the only balance to death and the only antidote to ego. I believe that kissing a woman with your tongue, as good as it is, is better when you are also making love to her with your penis. I believe that sex and love, when they come together, become the strongest human force on the face of the earth. Directly flouted, they become violence, wars; sublimated, they become art; acknowledged and lived, they become happiness.”

— Sebastien de Saint Vallier, Dance, Judy Cuevas

Forbidden Love

"The idea of a connection so irresistible that you’ll defy everything to be together? It’s the ultimate swoon. Part of what I find so alluring about it is the idea of seeing someone, really seeing them and being seen in return, cuts through layers of bigotry, hatred, and social conditioning."

                 — Laini Taylor on Forbidden Love

Love Among the Fauna

"Some days I am yellow and warm-hearted, living in tune to place and people, eyes opened, soul stirring, skin pricked, attached to nothing and everything." — MJ

(Personal Note: Today it's Spring and I am so grateful. Winters are always unkind to me. I do not like the cold and as I have aged, I like it less and less. Mentally, I sink under the weight of a gray sky and frosty temps that chill me to my bones. I can't ever get warm, never fully relaxed, and to distract myself, I usually over read or write until I can no longer see straight. I tried not to do that this year. But there were days of failures. I also tend to get a little gloomy and worry over my work and this year I exiled myself from my writing desk around the middle of February. I just could not go on any longer and knew it was destructive. This week I began again. I did allow myself to make notes. But only by handwriting. The only writing I allowed myself was free writing that would not be used in the WIP Fantasy. This decreased the tension I was experiencing, a success story if there ever was one. I learned this from writer Laini Taylor who talks a lot about process, free writing that is not used, day dreaming, keeping notebooks, and learning to love how you work on a novel. Working on a novel for me is extremely messy. I don't simply do all these drafts people talk about. I do things as I go. I write a chapter or section of the book until I feel it is something I might keep, until I like it, then I move on. This latest project has been more complex. I changed ships (who is the hero and love interest subplot) on my novel in December and then in January, I decided I wanted to write it in a new tense and use lots of vignettes. This meant I would literally have to revise the entire novel at some point. The decision to do this was so complicated, so resisted even by me that I wrote little in January and wondered if I had lost my mind. Part of my reasoning for this is a long story and I shall explain one day, but not today. I am motivated. It's spring. The sun is shining, flowers are budding and some are about to bloom. I can't complain. I made it through another winter. I survived and I am still in love with my story.)

Love. Love. Love. Fauna.

Violet : Introverted, profoundly introspective. It doesn’t hide itself, as some would say, out of modesty. It hides in order to understand its own secret. Its scent is a glory but demands that we go in search of it: its scent says what cannot be said. A bunch of violets means, Love others as you love yourself.

                  — Clarice Lispector

                        Fauna

Love with an Owl aka A Fairy Tale about Love.

 

This drawing is by Mary Jane Begin from a character in Terri Windling's The Wood Wife. Owl Boy.

It's a haunting image to me and when I saw it, I had to post, because I too, have an Owl creature which I wrote a fairy tale about a few years ago. The Owl King is my own creation, not really inspired by Terri's work though Terri and I love transformations in fairy stories or wonder tales. Terri herself is the inspiration, because after looking at her online presence for years, I became more comfortable with the idea of people changing into other forms, a bird or a wolf or even a butterfly or moth. I saw these images in films, of course, over the years. But I had never thought of my work going the way of transformation until about 2009, the year my mother died when I thought, maybe she just changed into something I could not see as she left this world. Maybe she is still here? Birds are my biggest inspirations. I love birds. And the owl is one of my favorites. The crow is another. I made friends with a crow last year in my garden. He came nearly every day for the longest time and he seemed to talk to me. The Owl King is very different from how I find the crow transformations in my fiction. The Owl King is partly inspired from Greek myth though I don't literally use the actual myth of that time. Just partly. I have created my own myth and loosely taken from another.

Halsey - Young God (Official Audio)

Profound. Reminds me of something I'm after.......

THIS

Once I saw at Cumae a Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when boys asked ‘Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied 'I want to die'. Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent Σιβυλλα τι θελεις respondebat illa αποθανειν θελω. — Petronius

It is always in motion, this Life.

"This empire of suffering and pain. There is no end to it. There cannot be. When we are poor we wish to be rich, when we are rich we wish to be loved, when we are loved we wish for freedom from pain and endless life and unchanging happiness. It is a great, unstoppable conundrum."

— Stefan Bachmann