Paul Thek's 96 Sacraments

to wake up
to breathe
to touch the earth
to pee
to wash
to prepare breakfast
to eat breakfast
to do the dishes
to clean up
to write a letter
to mail the letter
to go out
to see the sun
to do the shopping
to talk with some people
to buy a paper
to come home
to go to work
to work
to have work
to have lunch
to notice the light changing
to see a cat
to see a dog
to stop for a rest
to go home for dinner
to talk with a neighbor
to talk with a neighbor's child
to kiss someone
to eat dinner
to eat dinner with friends
to eat dinner with children
to eat dinner alone
to have dinner with someone
to think of love
to think of hope
to think
to dream, sing praises!
to plan
to write a poem
to read a poem
to forget bad things
to sing
to sing with someone
to hold hands
to hold anything
to hug
to get on a boat
to go somewhere
to eat a snack
to not eat a snack
to give away some money
to replace some technological education with some spiritual education
to see an island
to go swimming
to see somebody worse off
to see somebody better off
to go swimming nude
to make love in the daytime
to make love in the daytime with someone you love
to eat a peach
to comb your hair
to find a way to grow feathers
to satisfy all hunger in the world
to avoid dominations and dominating
to never stray
to be innocent of corruption
to not think (at least now and then)
to worship in another's church, in another way
to fly away into the air, high as a chicken, come back
to grow
to practice
to be just
to be stronger than you were
to understand a bit more
to like the ups & downs
to feel okay in spite of it all
to feel good knowing all the worst
to avoid being forced into defiance
to avoid emotional escalation
to forget the way
to make the way

--via

p.s. - Happy New Year! xo.

You let me drift off at the tips of your fingers.

I want cathedrals, strong and tall, to write my story on. I’ll write yours too, in my tiny and tall handwriting, deep like the Grand Canyon and right there to fill the gaps where mine goes missing—the places I forgot to take it all in. I crawl into my own head where everything looks two shades darker, and don’t pull up the curtains of my eyelids to let the light in because once it struck me blind and dumb, and I got scared. I don’t want to settle back down in the throne of my foolishness. Once you met me there and pointed me to the daylight and I’ve been wandering ever since, sun-stung and following awe like I could catch it and keep it right in my pocket, there next to my heart. You let me drift off at the tips of your fingers—you spoke me to sleep. Now the canary in my throat is always singing a yellow tune, because of you. And my fingers weave futures absentmindedly, my mind wanders ‘cross oceans and up mountain passes where I thought I’d meet you. I measured the steps, and turned on my heel to scribble it down for later, I mapped it for you strong and clear, napkins, novels, dashed lines to draw you closer—a place I thought I’d will parallel lines to cross. They were close, I thought, and then they drew away from each other. I think they were just scared when they heard something unfamiliar rattling towards them, which I’ve learned how to sense from a mile away, because I’m very much the same. But I mapped it for you, dear. I measured, I turned, I crossed the x’s and lassoed the moon to light your way. I’ll meet you there, I think. I’ll show you where and what I wrote, and the places I left open for the second sunrise, the third. I measured, I turned.

--jenna2step

Forget yourself.

"We're so inconsistent about what we let kill ya. "Smoking? Must be eradicated. Marijuana? Zero tolerance." But there's lots of ways to kill yourself. You know what I think kills you? Stress, and being a workaholic, and never getting laid, and, uh, McDonalds, and staying mad at people, and lying for a living, and three-martini lunches, and the all-American breakfast, and whatever the fuck Elvis was doing. That's what kills you."

--Bill Maher

"I don't even want to be rich I just want to be alone."

--John Darnielle

“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”
--William Faulkner

"Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

--Franz Kafka

“I had no motives, no incentives to exert myself, no duties. Life tasted horribly bitter. I felt that the long-standing disgust was coming to a crisis and that life pushed me out and cast me aside. I walked through the grey streets in a rage and everything smelt of moist earth and burial… How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals—and now this! How had the paralysis crept over me so slowly and furtively, this hatred against myself and everybody, this deep-seated anger and obstruction of all feelings, this filthy hell of emptiness and despair.”

--Hermann Hesse, 'Steppenwolf'

“It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”

--Stephen Fry

“How does one become a butterfly?” she asked pensively. ”You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.”

--Trina Paulus

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”

--Anaïs Nin

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, or flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me."

--Ralph Ellison

“I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Self-Reliance'

“It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.”

--John Waters

“I have never liked working. To me a job is an invasion of privacy.”

--Danny Mc Goorty

"Tell the story of your life, and somewhere along the line take off your pants."

--Andy Warhol

“They make it look so easy, connecting with another human being. It’s like no one told them it’s the hardest thing in the world.”

--Dexter Morgan

“The chill of what I won’t feel gnaws at my present heart.”

--Fernando Pessoa

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while.”

--Fernando Pessoa

“Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures…And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn’t changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.”

--Douglas Coupland

“I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.”

--Mary Oliver, 'Starlings in Winter'

“Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form: my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I’m fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists, drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there.”

--David Wojnarowicz

“Because there was a hunger in me to see everything and do everything. I wanted to be everyone I saw. I wasn’t enough for me.”

--Sidney Sheldon

“Words, I think, words are all you need for love—you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them. My idea in a love affair is that if everyone makes enough declarations, one of them is bound to come true. Words are interesting in that way.”

--Lorrie Moore, 'Anagrams'

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

--Henry Miller

"I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.”

--Anaïs Nin

empty and warm

for once i don’t want to talk about remembering. i want to talk about being. i want to talk about breathing. i want to talk about seeing and feeling. i want to talk about questioning and believing. how sometimes i can feel things changing right beneath me. how sometimes i have dreams of all the people who i have lost. that’s the tricky thing about loving someone. it doesn’t always stop when it should. when a soul dies or a person moves on. people expire but the feeling doesn’t. it lingers, phantom-limbed and without argument. you try to hide it in places you hope you’ll never look. but it sneaks up on you. it wakes up next to you. it curls inside your arms and you hold it like the way you’ve always known. i want to talk about some of these things i never say. some of the things that have too many gaps to try and fit my fingers around them and show you in between my careful palms. there are these dark places i try not to go because i’ve been there before and it’s not always easy to leave. there are these stars i see sometimes and i wonder what they’re thinking when they’re patiently staring back at me. how many wars have they seen? how many gods and kings, how many nameless feelings, how many people have they watched fall to their knees hoping for a sign that these lights missing their arms will never give. how many moments have they burned through. have i been burning too? if there is a heaven and a hell will i only spit on them both and take another road? what have i been burning for? i see them, moonstruck and raw. they wink happily, indifferently. through genocide and poverty and inequality. through hope, through young love, through those gorgeous little moments we all forget when we get too old. i try to be angry sometimes, i try because everything starts to feel so fucking hopeless. but i see these stars on cold nights and i wonder how something could be so beautiful and brave. i wonder how lucky i really am. i have so much time to learn how to love everything in life before i get too old. how rare and wonderful it is to be this young, to be this healthy, to be this free, to be this alive.

--Ashli Wood

i awoke and at times birds fled

i know the house you grew up in isn’t far from here. i don’t go there because i know it’s filled with ghosts. i write about you a lot and you don’t even know it. it’s hard sometimes. to say things i know you’ll never hear. i know a lot of things. like how to break a fence so that you can sneak into someone else’s pool. i know how to put it back together again quickly when it’s almost dawn and their porch lights just flickered on. i know how to pull the tail off a crawfish just right. i know that venus is the brightest planet in the sky. i know some things first hand. that the first thing you forget about a person is their voice. that sometimes you make wishes on people like they’re lost stars. how you find yourself alone at night starting to hope that when they finally fall to the earth you can collect them in the ruffles of your skirt. but sometimes they burn out before they even get that close.

i know that these knees i hold are only nineteen years old. but some of me is older.

you told me once that you loved my eye lashes and the face i made when the boys were yelling in the street and i was mystified. i’m always mystified. when real life for a fraction of a second actually feels like real life. like i know one day i’ll die and never get these things back. how sometimes summer can make a moment sizzle right before it fades.

you always sizzled just before you started to fade.

it’s hard not to cry when i think of thompson road in the passenger seat of that car you stole and your hand rolled cigarettes with their ashes floating out the window. i was electrified, i was terrified, i was young and that lonely highway didn’t mind. you were blue eyed and lovedrunk. i was fascinated. i was wide eyed and willing. i was whole and now i’m wilting. but i’m still fascinated, i’m still wide-eyed, i’m still reeling. i’m still pulling at what pleated pieces of you i’ve got left in the bottom of my pockets

because you found me and you changed me.

you were summer storms, you were swollen and sunburned, and i followed you where ever your lightening decided to strike. sometimes i tell people about you like it doesn’t hurt. like this isn’t hard. like it’s just lint, just loose change, some backyard apologies, some long lost stars we tried to collect in our collarbones once, some bottom of the ninth summer we forgot by the fall. we dug our selves a grave, took everything this world gave, never regretted a goddamn thing, we loved like it couldn’t break even when it did.

seven years. i only had you for seven years. but i did not cry. i did not mind. i was mesmerized. i felt something. it’s gone now, but it comes back in flashes. you dancing in the kitchen, getting lost in destin, the tangles in your hair, the long drive from texas, when you let me fall asleep in the space between your shoulder and your neck, when you told me i made you feel safe. you’re gone now. you’ve been gone for a long time. but i know i felt something. i didn’t cry because i know for the rest of our lives that at least once there was a moment in the middle when we felt something.

--Ashli Wood

felt wrong not to swing

i know a boy who changed a part of me he’s never even seen. we were sitting indian style on those wood floors, listened to them creak like poetry in between your words. we sat in awe at the way your hands could say the things your voice could not. you smelled like weed and we tasted like beer. you turned the lights off and played music for us in the dark, said you didn’t want us to listen - you wanted us to feel. i’m always meeting people who are trying to get me to feel, like i don’t know how and they can show me the way. you spoke like you had the secrets of the universe. we all want secrets. we all follow anyone we think has the secrets. i knew a girl once with a broken heart. she used to make me come up with poems off the top of my head. i’d just end up telling her all my favorite words. i’m always giving people adjectives even though they’re all looking for verbs. one day she didn’t hurt anymore. and i stopped telling her poetry when she got so lonely she thought she would cry. i know a lot of people i fell half in love with once. i can’t remember most of their names. it doesn’t mean they weren’t important. sometimes the most important things in this life don’t need names. sometimes strangers can see us in ways no one else ever could. i hope you all know this feeling. if not now, i hope you find a moment where the experience strikes you. i hope you are startled by this life sometimes. i hope sometimes you look up at night and realize, even if just for a single second, there is an entire universe out there - and you are apart of it. you are apart of this. we are a part of this together. i hope you find the courage to keep going when you want to stop. i hope you find the strength to lose it all and start over again. sometimes i start to think that we’re just lights everyone can feel and when we hit a certain shadow, when we find a certain color, we bend into them and make this world apart of us in a way it was never supposed to be. what a happy accident it is to live, you know. what a happy accident this life is sometimes. like some handful of colors you never thought would go together.

--Ashli Wood

in the morning through the window shade

there are moments in this life that are exceptional and rare. and i know we had too much vodka, but the water was so warm, the night felt so good on our fingers. everything was crooked but sometimes it’s easy to pretend it’s all okay, it’s all alright. so we leaned against the edge with our hands cupped next to our eyes. you looked like summer, with that lonely gleam, with that half smile. you said “on the count of three we’re going to look up and forget everything.” you always do things like that. take any chance to kiss regret goodbye, to leave this life behind. and after that i heard your voice but couldn’t make out the words. all i could think of is the way you held my hand underwater once. the way the stars were wet and brave. shook above us in that fucking sky we’re always trying to touch. and when i heard you shout the number one i got really scared. i felt so goddamn ashamed. because i wasn’t ready to forget. i wasn’t that brave. i wanted to remember when you told me secrets in the backyard. the way we all waded in the water with these thoughts lit up like sparklers. how you made all of us love you but it was never enough. and it always fucking hurt, this life always fucking hurts, but i am dazzled by it and i can’t help but hold it close. i can’t help but want to live even if i don’t know why. i can’t help but love this life without effort sometimes, if only for just a second, for just some cracked and crooked moment. this is hard for me. it’s hard to not be fascinated and scared when you know that your last chance to live is also your first. and all of a sudden you’re already shouting “two” and i’m thinking about the snowballs in the chinese take out boxes on plum street and the way the sun light pressed against your neck, and how your eyelashes were so close to mine. i’m thinking about the water splashing against my face when we sat too close to the waves and i laughed at the sky but all of a sudden i felt this surge of emotion and just started to cry right there. i had to turn quick before you saw and knew that i was really this fucking broken, that i was really this ugly. that i feel so many things at once and sometimes i need to know that i’m not the only one. that other people feel so fucking crazy and alone sometimes. and then you’re whispering with our mouthes barely above the water and all i can see is you crying in the theatre and all i can see is the way you looked at me when i told you that we’re all just burning buildings. but now you’re telling me about the tumor that they found in your head and i’m trying not to listen but then you’re shouting the number three and for a second, for just a second, i really did forget everything. and i was just warm water. i was dust in between the stars. i was something without moments, without thoughts, without a stupid little life, without a crooked little heart. and the second i snapped back i saw your face. and i was trying not to cry, because if i forgot everything i would never know that there are moments in this life that are exceptional and rare. i would never know what it was like to love something so fucking much that it doesn’t even matter if it’s not yours. all you know is you cannot, under any goddamn circumstances, ever let it go.

--Ashli Wood