Growing Versions

“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.” --Nadine Gordimer

"For whatever we lose (a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea." -e.e.cummings, 100 Selected Poems

For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your destruction. This is your birth. -n.t.

I am not writing like I had been. When I first started this blog, the words flowed out of me in gushes. As time went along, I learned to edit, omit and shape my ideas. As my skills in photography grew, my need for words has gradually lessened. But what I've learned about writing and creating in general is that there are times for making and there are times for waiting. How about you? "Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave." EB White

Last night, my son and I ventured to the playground after dark because he was very excited to show me how he now feels brave enough to jump off the playground equipment with a rope.   It was a starry clear night, with just a smattering of snow on the ground, and as we walked I commented that we hadn't done that much sledding this year.  Thanks to a gentle winter mostly, I thought. My son responded, "yeah, the years are getting fierce.  The wind is blowing so strong and people are making jumps these days.  When I was four, I got on a little sled and went down little hills, now it's getting fierce and I don't want to go sledding anymore." I had no idea.

"...Loss creates holes in your life, the holes create more surface area in a person, so tremendous loss doesn't have to make you darker but it can make you deeper." Augusten Burroughs

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."-Anais Nin

  There are years that ask questions and years that answer.                                      - Zora Neale Hurston

"I am rooted, but I flow."-Virginia Woolf, The Waves

"Always do what is next."-George Carlin

"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone... In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured." -Herman Hesse

"The sun himself is weak when he first rises, and gathers strength and courage as the day gets on."-Charles Dickens

"Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly." -Charles Addams

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.” —Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

 "We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching." C. S. Lewis

“A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy's feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight...”-Allen Shawn

Spring is like a perhaps hand  (which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging a window,into which people look(while people stare arranging and changing placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here)and changing everything carefully spring is like a perhaps Hand in a window (carefully to and fro moving New and Old things,while people stare carefully moving a perhaps fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there)and without breaking anything. e.e. cummings

"I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing-a noun, I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process."-Buckminster Fuller

We are gearing up for a new year. We are Starting New Projects , tackling old problems , and beginning a new chapter . We have stocked up on sunshine, we have roamed, we have introduced baby cousins to blackberries and said goodbye to a  close friend. And now, we turn our heads. I feel the urge to burrow. This time of year contains a lot of promise and intentions.  With promise comes fear, fear of messing up and a misplaced determination to perfect  my life. These beautiful words inspired me and put me in my place tonight.  It is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever. I turn against you, I break from you, I turn to you. We hurt, and are hurt, and have each other for healing. It is healing. It is never whole. -Wendell Berry

"In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes. In order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness, etc., before one is sufficiently naked."  - Soren Kierkegaard