This page is very much under construction, and will be frequently updated (I hope). It’s a moodboard of sorts – a random mishmash of images, quotes, inspiration, poetry, art, and all sorts of sweet, silly things that speak to me in some way! Maybe they will speak to you too ❤
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings —
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on the ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the properties of making colours darker.
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves —
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
~ Craig Raine
Reading is a passionate act. If you read a story not just with your head, but also with your body and feelings and soul, the way you dance or listen to music, then it becomes your story. And it can mean infinitely more than any message. It can offer beauty. It can take you through pain. It can signify freedom. And it can mean something different every time you reread it.
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Message About Messages
Love Waltz With Fireworks
Seventeen minutes ago, I was in love
with the cashier and a cinnamon pull-apart,
seven minutes before that, it was a gray-
haired man in argyle socks, a woman
dancing outside the bakery holding
a cigarette and broken umbrella. The rain,
I’ve fallen in love with it many times,
the fog, the frost - how it covers the clover
- and by clovers I mean lovers.
And now I’m thinking how much I want to rush up
to the stranger in the plaid wool hat
and tell him how much I love his eyes,
all those fireworks, every seventeen minutes, exploding
in my head - you the baker, you the novelist,
you the reader, you the homeless man on the corner
with the strong hands - I’ve thought about you. But
in this world we’ve been taught too keep
our emotions tight, a rubberband ball we worry
if one band loosens, the others will begin shooting off
in so many directions. So we quiet.
I quiet. I eat my cinnamon bread
in the bakery watching the old man still sitting
at his table, moving his napkin as he drinks
his small cup of coffee, and I never say,
I think you’re beautiful, except in my head,
except I decide I can’t
live this way, and walk over to him and
place my hand on his shoulder, lean in close
and whisper, I love your argyle socks,
and he grabs my hand,
the way a memory holds tight in the smallest
corner. He smiles and says,
I always hope someone will notice.
There’s something nice in the idea that an elusive animal might stop flashing its old calling card – that the physical creature wouldn’t even match the statistics of its own mythology. We have tuned our hearts to a signal that no longer exists. Which means there is no way to find what we’ve been looking for, only – perhaps – to find what that thing has become.
Leslie Jamison, “52 Blue: The Loneliest Whale in the World”
stella reads and writes 