—SOME DAYS I’M WALKING BACKWARDS

 

 

“In the end, the only things worth doing are the things that might possibly break your heart.”

Colum McCann

 

“Hey, if tacos can totally fall apart and still be amazing, so can you.” Jonathan Edward Durham

 

“Distance is not a problem, the problem is humans, because we don't know to love without touching, seeing or listening. And love is felt with the heart, not the body.” Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

  

“And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one.” Kurt Vonnegut

 

“I wonder if the things that remind me of you, remind you of me.”  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

 

"𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘨, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩. 𝘉𝘶𝘵, 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘢 𝘧𝘦𝘸 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴."  Before Sunrise/Before Sunset

 

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. ~Louise Erdrich

 

"You cannot save people,

you can only love them."

~Anaïs Nin

 

Dear Human:

You've got it allllll wrong. You didn't come here to master unconditional love. That is where you came from and where you'll return. You came here to learn personal love. Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love. Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love. Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling. Demonstrated through the beauty of messing up. Often. You didn't come here to ...be perfect. You already are. You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous. And then to rise again into remembering. But unconditional love? Stop telling that story. Love, in truth, doesn't need ANY other adjectives. It doesn't require modifiers. It doesn't require the condition of perfection. It only asks that you show up. And do your best. That you stay present and feel fully. That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU. It's enough. It's Plenty.

~Courtney A. Walsh

  

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." Joan Didion

 

Give me back my broken night

my mirrored room, my secret life

it's lonely here,

there's no one left to torture

Give me absolute control

over every living soul

And lie beside me, baby,

that's an order!

--Leonard Cohen

 

 “There’s something terrible about reality and I don’t know what it is. No one will tell me.”- Red Desert / Michelangelo Antonioni, dir. 1964

 

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett

 

 The moon comes up.

The moon goes down.

This is to inform you

that I didn't die young.

Age swept past me

but I caught up.

Spring has begun here and each day

brings new birds up from Mexico.

Yesterday I got a call from the outside

world but I said no in thunder.

I was a dog on a short chain

and now there's no chain.

-- Jim Harrison

  

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.” Chuck Palahniuk

  

“Writing teachers ‘have so much power.’ They could mock us, disregard us, use us to prop themselves up. But out teachers, if they are good, instead do something almost hold, which we never forget; they take us seriously.” George Saunders

 

Evidence

 

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

in allegiance with gravity

while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads. ~Mary Oliver

 

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” Allen Ginsberg

 

“When everything goes wrong, what a joy to test your soul and see if it has endurance and courage! An invisible and all-powerful enemy—some call him God, others the Devil, seems to rush upon us to destroy us; but we are not destroyed.” ~Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

 

 Loose Woman / Sandra Cisneros

 

That was enough

for me to forgive you.

To spirit a tiger

from its cell.

Called me corazón

in that instant before

I let go the phone

back to its cradle.

Your voice small.

  

“It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing to wait for.” Marcel Proust

 

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” Charles Bukowski