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we were just pretending

"I guess I like that idea that you could pretend yourself into new feelings and new relationships. Obviously I'm a big pretender. but the kind of leap where it's almost like some kind of science fiction thing happens. Like we were just pretending, and then what's this? We actually have new powers now, and we see each other differently, and in fact all of life has suddenly tilted. I'm going for that everyday, personally."
~ Miranda July

Posts tagged "motion"

When I wake up just before dawn and hear the throbbing voices of birds as they echo against the silence, I am overpowered by yearning. When I ride in the dark on stark roads through dry, bald hills, I ache with desperate longing. I don’t know what I am longing for, maybe for some place of my own within these images, some place where I fit, instead of being the one human being still awake, the only thing moving across the hills in the arid darkness. Maybe that ache is loneliness. I haven’t found a name for the feeling yet, nor do I know exactly what awakes in me. But instinct warns me that it is too potent for me, that my soul is on the verge of cracking when I feel it that way. I cannot handle the sheer power of those wild emotions by myself. I have to find some way to share them. That is why I write. It’s instinctive. I just have to—because it is awake like lava in my blood, and sustains me.

Rachel Corrie, Let Me Stand Alone

This book was a big deal for me.

Cool wall art | Time Out New York

“Girl, With Landscape” - Alyce Miller

The geography is always ahead of her,
a postcard highlighting Irish green and beauty,
a teeming, dusty market place in Budapest,
a Balinese temple steeming in the jungle,
and now she, just a speck, whistling
in first-class comfort on a train through Barcelona

Out the window the horizon is a focal point,
a place from which to measure
how long it takes to get from one location
to the next. Familiarity startles, then bores,
the viewer has seen it all before, a landscape
made more real through imitation.

Each time the shutter snaps or the paint brush stops,
she stands posed like a phrase,
human figure in miniature, an artist’s little joke,
demonstrating our insignificance among grandeur

After the shutter snaps, she disappears altogether.
She is about motion, the frame now sits perfectly empty.
It is what we know of the silence of trees and mountains,
we remember nothing of her, she has gone unnoticed.

[This poem, published in Born Magazine in 2001, is where this blog’s URL (and a tattoo that I have) comes from.]

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperably; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have—positively—a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang—there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often.

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

What Do You Pack For A Seven-Year Trip? : NPR →

Paul Salopek is already a well-traveled journalist — a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who has spent most of the past two decades roaming across Africa, Asia, the Balkans and Latin America.

This, apparently, has not sated his wanderlust. So now he’s in a dusty village in Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, ready to launch a seven-year, 21,000-mile journey on foot that will take him from Africa, across the Middle East and through Asia, over to Alaska and down the Western edge of the Americas until he hits the southern tip of Chile.

Why?

“The short version is I’m interested in narrative, I’m interested in storytelling,” Salopek, speaking by satellite phone, tells Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep. “After jetting around the world as a foreign correspondent, after flying into stories, after driving into them, helicoptering in, even, I thought about what it would be like to walk between stories. Not just to see the stories we were missing by flying over them, but to understand the connective tissue of all the major stories of our day.”

Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie

Joanna Newsom,

The Milk-Eyed Mender

There are mornings when the sky looks like a road

risingconverging:

Joanna Newsom- “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie”

I thought I’d never met anyone who’d lived with more absolute freedom … A need to keep moving, as if whenever he stayed anywhere too long, he exhausted the present by soaking it in too intensely.

Joyce Johnson on Kerouac (via fuckyeahbeatgeneration)

wildlydistorted:

What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth?

A time lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. Beginning over the Pacific Ocean and continuing over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica.
Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, El Salvador, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon. Also visible is the Earth’s ionosphere (thin yellow line), a satellite and the stars of our galaxy.

Wow. The cities look like explosions.

(via crookedindifference)

Tell it, Ramona.

(via amandaskankovich)

“Done With It” - Chris Forhan

At the county landfill, a scavenging grackle,
in luminous purple-black cowl,
eyeing me with the indifference reserved
for those of his order. I have come

to disown my sofa—worn, gone weak
in the middle, a battered cabinet
I strained to lift, a sack of clothes,
a box of books—things I thought

I loved and gathered strength from,
meager harbors where I anchored
in my languor, in my sleepy
certainty, and woke up stranded.

I will stand above these things
and speak no words, but watch
a derelict shoe go back
to the self it was without me,

watch the long yellow sleeve of a shirt
wave in the wind, useless, bright
with the sheen of abandonment.
I will learn to live with fragments:

clumps of kite string trapped in branches,
clatter of a tin can kicked
down a rain-slick alley—shreds
of memory, little things

that cling without my clinging to them:
pennies trembling on the track, a black
pebble from the roof of the house
I grew up in, the sly

advance of the elm tree’s shade
toward the rail fence in autumn, chill
of my first snow, sidewalk slush,
red boots my mother tugged on my feet,

or lying in bed as a boy, August,
the room buzzing with dusk and sudden
silence, scent of sweet upturned dirt
as the curtains swelled and sank.

I will serve what served me well, far back
and pick through the old scraps, rapt
in a faithful watchfulness. It is time
to make my movements count

like the grackle, who, in his hunger,
in his solitude, as I come
too near, lifts his wings
and shrieks just once.