Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy’s first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world’s one and only truth. But the world isn’t perfect, and the law is incomplete. Equivalent Exchange doesn’t encompass everything that goes on here, but I still choose to believe in its principle: that all things do come at a price, that there’s an ebb and a flow, a cycle, that the pain we went through did have a reward, and that anyone who’s determined and perseveres will get something of value in return, even if it’s not what they expected.
Japon, my city sister
A north wind
They beckoned us no further—
You’ve found home, now sleep
Weary child wanderers laid to rest
In each others arms
The light fading slow
A final fiberglass breath
All I’ve wanted yet
is there with you
my love, my dearest
My perfect home.
In a tree are tales immortal—the tellers long outlived
By branches, by roots, ever reaching
Towards heaven, or hell, or both.
Watchers of us all, this tree
Remembering children sleeping at it’s feet
Who soon grew into monsters—
Old enough to climb, to claw
leave fingernail scars carved in bark—
but lost their balance, knocked their chin
lost their sharp baby teeth,
the blood on felled leaves,
a red hand grasping
the anonymous brutality of youth.
In the height of its nakedness, I see it—
the carved claws and sanguine stains,
but even the keeper of a thousand bloody years
knows best how to flower in the spring.
I’ve been writing a lot of “poetry” lately. I don’t consider myself a poet at all. I don’t understand it. It’s a level of writing which I have not quite risen to, but nonetheless I try. Most of it’s stream of consciousness. I’ll post it anyway.
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me…. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person.
—
Sylvia Plath, Poet and author of ‘The Bell Jar’
(via sexismandthecity)
(Source: celebritytypes.com, via teachingliteracy)
If anyone would like to give me feedback on my novel writeup, send your e-mail address my way. I’d like as much input as I can get.
Ask box
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.
— Pearl S. Buck (via misswallflower)
(via teachingliteracy)
And in the final moments of outrage, when you just begin to think, “Perhaps I’ve lost my mind,” you’re the sanest you’ve ever been.
