“an indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women's Review of Books. Kumin also noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.” Breakage by Mary Oliver I go down to the edge of the sea. How everything shines in the morning light! The cusp of the whelk, the broken cupboard of the clam, the opened, blue mussels, moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred— and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone. It's...
I love this image of Emily Dickinson, Daguerreotype. ca. 1847.
I adore the dress she is wearing.
I love her poetry.
I DWELL IN POSSIBILITY
by Emily Dickinson
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –
I recently read Joan Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Here is a quote from this deep, grace filled book.
We are not idealised wild things, we are imperfect mortals, aware of that mortality even as we push away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses, we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: ‘Love has no ending. ‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, ‘I’ll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. ‘The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world.’ But all the clocks in...
Primavera by Sandro Botticelli. Nine mythological figures appearing in an orange grove surrounded by hundreds of varieties of plants, with over 200 hundred flowers depicted, this jewel in the Uffizi Gallery crown bursts with spring flora. This botanical abundance, and its scattered, almost wallpaper-like rendering, has a striking reference to millefleur (or “thousand flower”) Flemish tapestries, which were common in many palaces of Botticelli’s age. Rich in beauty and symbolism, with references to classical and renaissance poetry and literature, it is unknown when Botticelli made the painting (although scholars agree it was the 1470s or early 1480s). Detail of Primavera by Sandro Botticelli. In Renaissance Italy, Neoplatonic artists and thinkers sought to synthesize or draw parallels between the beliefs of classical antiquity and...
