Summer Solstice

I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
When I finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. There is still so much
I want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on Walnut Street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
Where is the evidence I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
There are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
The moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say the night we rushed
North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
I stand between taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
Here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
We hunger for eloquence.
We measure the isopleths.
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.
--Stacie Cassarino

I think I made you up inside my head.

“Relationships are both wonderful and tricky. The wonderful traits of a person are all sparkly and shiny, and we are attracted to that. But the real work is learning to find good in the gnarly aspects. It is a real art. Believing in the other person’s goodness and integrity enough to be content with working with the challenging parts. The sparkly parts are easy to love. Our job is to make the love bigger than an argument or an intense disagreement. You see, this is being authentic, vulnerable and true. And much more than a fairytale type romance. The real and honest and courageous decision is to love the warts and all. That is the true miracle.”

--Rachel Sat Siri Dougherty

“I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses… We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

“Happiness often slips in through a door you didn’t know you left open.”

--John Barrymore

“I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.”

--Sylvia Plath

“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)”

--Sylvia Plath

“You don’t need to make your tastes a self-conscious statement about who you are. Just unapologetically like the things you like.”

--Adulting: Step 179: Stop enjoying things ironically. Just enjoy them.

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

--Margaret Atwood

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill. 

You know how it is with an April day."

--Robert Frost

“You can’t ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.”

--Tove Jansson

“Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself; is it worth it? And it just isn’t.”

--Miranda July

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”

--Joyce Carol Oates

“Vulnerability is one of the last things we share with people, yet one of the first things they try to recognize.”

--Dallas Clayton 

“It’s great when you finally realise that being miserable doesn’t protect you from bad stuff happening.”

--Alain de Botton

“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

--Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.”

--Coco Chanel

“God is within her, she will not fall;

God will help her at break of day.”

--Psalm 46:5

“The world is simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

--Henry Miller

“The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.”

--Germaine Greer

“Every stylish girl knows that when the sun goes down, the heel goes up.”

--Nina Garcia

“There is in the soul a desire for not thinking. For being still. Coupled with this a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous. But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch, not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.”

--Raymond Carver, 'All of Us: The Collected Poems'

“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”

--W. Somerset Maugham, 'The Moon and Sixpence'

There isn't enough of anything as long as we live.

All quotes by author Raymond Carver

“Cool summer nights. Windows open. Lamps burning.

Fruit in the bowl. And your head on my shoulder.

These the happiest moments in the day.

Next to the early morning hours, of course.

And the time just before lunch. And the afternoon,

and early evening hours. But I do love these

summer nights. Even more, I think, than those other

times. The work finished for the day.

And no one who can reach us now. Or ever.”

"It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love."

"That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones."

"And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth."

"Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read."

"Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from."

"There isn't enough of anything

as long as we live. But at intervals

a sweetness appears and, given a chance

prevails."

careless in our summer clothes,

Together, we wrote a letter: “Dear August, our muscles are tired.” Standing in the doorway, I caught the last glimpse of July, lazy heat hovering over the parked cars like restless ghosts. Sometimes, mostly when it’s early (or when my headphones can’t save me), I think about all of the people we’ve been with one another. All of those colors that bled us dry, turned us muddy like watercolor water. And in the knee-tall grass with your hands behind your back, I knew there’d always been something between us akin to the wonder that keeps the stars apart (forgive me if I’m paraphrasing). The yellow pins slowly stopped singing, but that’s okay. This was all delicate and harsh, like smoke rings I wore like proud diamonds even when they turned my finger green. I am writing a letter with all of those high altitude thoughts—the ones that made my fingers twitch as I moved backwards through time. But about July, and whatever came before it: I am waving goodbye. Ushering in the change that comes ahead with childlike calls to the backyard. Let’s be barefoot. Let’s give up what we know, not to have it taken away but to abandon it. “Dear July, you were a red herring. Dear August, here we are, please keep our roots from doubling back. Please keep us safe like a kiss on the corner of the mouth. Please don’t write us all off just yet.”
--jenna2step

You belong.

"You should above all things be glad and young

For if you're young, whatever life you wear

it will become you; and if you are glad

whatever's living will yourself become."

--EE Cummings

“You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly—radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music, man. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it. … Nobody has to fool around with musty old scores, weird notation, and scholarship bullshit: you can just go into a record store and pick a century, pick a country, pick anything, and dig it, make it a part of you, add it to the stuff you carry around, and see that it’s all music.”

--Jerry Garcia

“Pick the day. Enjoy it — to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present, and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.”

--Audrey Hepburn

"That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.”

--Andy Warhol

“Let’s face it, you’re either serious about what you’re doing or you’re not serious about what you’re doing. And you can’t mix the two. And life is short.”

--Bob Dylan on Creativity

"I like beginnings because they're so full of promise. The first page of a book, the first day of a job, the first time you buy yourself flowers, the first date with a new man, the first touch, the first kiss, the first kick of a good liquour, the first moment you hold your own baby. I like beginnings because I know there's always more to come."

--Shyma Perera, 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'

“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others … But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time.”

--Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms

“We have an idea of a “summer book”. To be read on a beach, or in a hammock, or amid long grass. It promises pleasure and total immersion: if every few minutes you find yourself laying it flat upon your chest and wondering about lunch then it is probably not a summer book.”

--Zadie Smith

“I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses. We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

Be in love with your life.

"I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well."

--Oliver Goldsmith

"It’s up to you to pump up your own heart. Get it real big. Then let everyone in."

--Kimya Dawson

“I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself- as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to define myself.”

--Haruki Murakami

“Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”

--Audrey Niffenegger

“The fortunate people - the truly fortunate - are not so much those who succeed in life as those who succeed in living. There are some who do both; many who do neither, and some who do either one, but not the other. Success in life, so called, can be overdone, but hardly success in living. It seems possible to succeed too much in various lines of attainment, legitimate and sincerely profitable in themselves, but success in living involves getting the most out of life, not in a day or a year or a decade, but in a lifetime. That involves living wisely, and you can’t live too wisely.

--Edward Sanford Martin, 'Too Much Success', 1908

“I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”

--Audrey Hepburn

“I want you for mine & mine forever. You & you only. I’l gladly give my heart for yours & at any time you wish we’ll make the exchange.”

--William Glass Meggs to his future wife, Miss Nellie Lang, April 1899

“… but, that’s what it’s all about. A toothless smile. A middle finger. A freshly gooey slice of Napoleon pizza and the bigger jeans you have to buy. The lingerie to feel sexy in and the moments you think, Sono solo, I am alone. It is imperfect. It is a combination of the tears you drown in each night and the wide-eyed, gasping-for-air, tears-rolling-down-your-cheek laughter you share with friends in the afternoon. It is life. It is wonderful. It all feels so right. Attraversiamo.”

--Elizabeth Gilbert, 'Eat Pray Love'

“I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens, but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”

--L.M. Montgomery

“Forgive and give as if it were your last opportunity. Love like there’s no tomorrow, and if tomorrow comes, love again.”

--Max Lucado

“You say that you love rain, but you open your umbrella when it rains. You say that you love the sun, but you find a shadow spot when the sun shines. You say that you love the wind, but you close your windows when wind blows. This is why I am afraid, you say that you love me too.”

--William Shakespeare

“On the other side

I can see us waiting for

all we know we’ll be.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“‘You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”

“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Tender Is the Night'

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause, you who read this, and think for a long moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on that memorable day.”

--Charles Dickens, 'Great Expectations'

“You spend 99% of your life looking for the other 1%. But it’s worth it.”

--I Wrote This For You

“Be in love with your life. Every detail of it.”

--Jack Kerouac

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

--Jhumpa Lahiri

“Instead of looking at the past, I put myself ahead twenty years and try to look at what I need to do now in order to get there then.”

--Diana Ross

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Great Gatsby'

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’m gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”

--Salman Rushdie

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party

and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

You want a better story. Who wouldn't?

--Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

“Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.”

--Oprah Winfrey

“Luxury has changed a lot. In the past it was eating in a three-star restaurant. Now it’s eating home-grown vegetables in a garden or somewhere on a mountain, or going to a small cottage where you find handmade cheese, and just having a taste of that in open air, that’s luxury now. In fashion it’s a bit the same. In the past, haute couture was luxury. And now finding a sweater in hand-spun cashmere somewhere in the hills of Nepal is far more exciting and luxurious.”

--Dries Van Noten

“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. I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.”

--Fernando Pessoa

“I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?”

--Neil Gaiman, 'Coraline'

Where do we go from here?

"A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken."

--James Dent

We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives…and to the “good life”, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.”

--Hunter S. Thompson

“With her white hair and her white dress she was so white that she looked silver.”

--Sylvia Plath

"The other day I was down by the Hudson River, and I see two nuns in full habit rollerblading down the street holding hands. And I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I get it. The world is surreal and beautiful. And everything is fine.'"

--Regina Spektor

“It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, and nitrogen, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. So forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

--Lawerence Krauss

"Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there--I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. . . . Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television."

--Andy Warhol, 1975

"A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again."

--Margare Mead

“I don’t think that a lot of women today are feminine, feminine, feminine. I think most women have both sides to them; they are forced to. Because we’re working, and we are not only mothers and girlfriends and wives, we identify with all of that; I think men do too. It is a false myth that women are this and men are that; I think there is a balance in everyone.”

--Stella McCartney

"I know it sounds ridiculous, but I like disappearing."

--Keira Knightley

"How private you are

In the minds of everyone

I salute you

Brave spirit

Who has swallowed so much

And tasted so little."

--Leonard Cohen, 'During The Day: An Excerpt'

“‎It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.”

--Virginia Woolf

“And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.”

--Virginia Woolf, 'To The Lighthouse'

"I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don’t. If you can weigh it, it isn’t worth the bother. It isn’t what you’re after. It isn’t going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, “That’s that, where do we go from here?”"

--William Saroyan, 'Here Comes There Goes You Know Who'

I don't worry 'bout things that I can't change

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
--Tom Stoppard

“Time’s fun when you’re having flies.”
--Kermit

Fear less, hope more
Whine less, breathe more
Talk less, say more
Hate less, love more
And all good things are yours
--Swedish Proverb

“Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.”
--Sam Ewig

“Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It’s not hard. Character is doing what’s right when nobody’s looking.”
--J. C. Watts

Baby come home, baby don't even bother, baby you are not my baby anymore.

You fit just right. No fireworks, no champagne on New Year's Eve out of the bottle. Not the ride of your life, but that cup of coffee in the morning. It's the things that keep us warm and it's where we are happy, not wanting to stuff our faces. We're just looking to sit in the sunlight, hopefully a little breeze.

The trouble is that you think you have time.

"Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability."
--Sam Keen

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
--Dorothy Parker

"I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it."
--Dorothy Parker

It's not a secret if it's half known

“Man, these are brutal. Kind of want to fold you up in a big comforter and give you a hot chocolate or something — tell you it won’t feel so bad in the sunlight tomorrow.”

Standin' proud, standin' tall
Standin' smack dab in the middle of it all
I don't worry 'bout things that I can't change

“A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
--Napoleon Hill

It doesn't matter if others are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.

Time doesn't exist. Clocks exist.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

If you believe, you'll touch the sky.
If you dream, you'll land on the moon,
If you have faith, you'll become someone.
If you have hope, things will fall into place.
If you breathe, everything will be okay.

Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who decided to stand their ground.

"When you taste this one, you can still sense the heaviness left behind. It's the shadow under the sweet, the question on the tip of your tongue."

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

The love that was summer.

The love that was summer. It ended like it never happened.

“He sat in the big chair and held out his arms so that she could nestle inside them. ‘I knew you’d come tonight,’ she said softly, ‘like summer just when I needed you most.’”
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'This Side of Paradise'

“Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season; it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape."
--Harper Lee, 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

Sweet Sweet Summer

As the breeze sweeps across the cold sand, the moon casts off a glitter where the waves meet the shore. The air smells of dried coconut oil, tan skin, and sweet sweet summer.

Summer is for breaking. Pack nothing. Leave without a note. Follow your internal compass. Wear what you slept in. Sleep in what you're wearing. Use SPF. Fisten to the ocean but don't take it's advice word for word. Insist on karaoke. Display skin. Attract a following. Steal a heart. Lose track of time. Live your life.

We sat on rooftops that summer night, listening to the wind. Something about it just made you wanna run. It made you wanna scream and laugh and cry and thank god that you were even alive. To me, that was life. To me, that was living.

There's something about waking up when the sun's halfway across the sky, only to fall asleep moments later to a soundtrack of splashing in the warm sun. There's something about washing away salt and sand to get ready for a night out. There's something about the lack of need for makeup, cause the sun's taken care of that. There's something about summer that beats through our veins and defines our lives.

"Tans fade, highlights go dark, and we all get sick of sand in our shoes. But the end of summer is the beginning of a new season, so we find ourselves looking to the future."
--'Gossip Girl'