Black Maps by Mark Strand

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

nor the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.
Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.
You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,
in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,
the bleak temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.
And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours
do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,
waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,
saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

This took my breath away.

I thought it was a scarf.
Turns out it isn't.

In Beautiful Bloom

*All snippets and photos are from the article written by Christopher Jobson, Creator and curator of Colossal, an art and design blog. Go visit! It'll be worth the while.

"In 2003 a building housing the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC) was slated for demolition to make way for updated facilities. The closure was a time for reflection and remembrance as the MMHC had been in operation for over 9 decades and had touched countless thousands of patients and employees alike, and the pending demolition presented a unique problem. How does one memorialize a building impossibly rich with a history of both hope and sadness, and do it in a way that reflects not only the past but also the future?"

"To answer that question artist Anna Schuleit was commissioned to do the impossible. After an initial tour of the facility she was struck not with what she saw but with what she didn’t see: the presence of life and color. While historically a place of healing, the drab interior, worn hallways, and dull paint needed a respectful infusion of hope. With a limited budget and only three months of planning Schuleit and an enormous team of volunteers executed a massive public art installation called Bloom."

"The concept was simple but absolutely immense in scale. Nearly 28,000 potted flowers would fill almost every square foot of the MMHC including corridors, stairwells, offices and even a swimming pool, all of it brought to life with a sea of blooms. The public was then invited for a limited 4-day viewing as a time for needed reflection and rebirth."

haha

from flavorwire

from Explore

Just Little Things

The small things are often the most neglected. 

But catching them could just turn out to be the best moments of our day.

more here

Gandhi's Top 10 Fundamentals For Changing The World

via Explore

Coffee

via Explore

via brainpickings

#19. Accept loss forever.

Jack Kerouac's "30 Cool Tips"

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

via Dodo Dayao.

Minimalist has never been this cute!

I found this wonderful little link over at writer Maria Popova's twitter. Designer Christian Jackson created a series of minimalist posters for popular children's books. Such whimsy and delight!

Here are a few examples of his works:

=)

Found

I’m always breaking
something, a hand-thrown
mug, a path, a promise.
This life requires a map
I can’t find, a gentleness
I can’t feel, a surety I know
only in these edges that keep me
from stepping on a mess
of my own making.

- Karen Schubert, "Breaking"


from Jonathan Carroll

Have a ___ Day

by Lou Lipsitz

Have a nice day. Have a memorable day.
Have (however unlikely) a life-changing day.
Have a day of soaking rain and lightning.
Have a confused day thinking about fate.

Have a day of wholes.
Have a day of poorly marked,
unrecognizable wholes you
cannot fathom.
Have a ferocious day, a bleak
unbearable day. Have a
riotously unproductive day;
a grim jaw-clenched, Clint Eastwood vengeful
law enforcement day.
Have a day of raging, hair-yanking
jealousy and meanness. Have a day
of almost grasping
how whole you are; a finely tuned,
empty day.

Have a nice day of walking and circling;
a day of stalking and hunting,
of planting strange seeds and wandering in the woods.
Have a day of endearing nonsense,
of hopelessly combing your hair,
a day of yielding, of swallowing
hard, breathing more deeply,
a day of fondness for beetles
and macabre spectacles, or irreverence
about anything you want, of just
sitting and wondering.
Have a day of wondering if it's
going to help, or if it just doesn't matter;
a day of dark winds
and torrents flowing though the valley,
of diving into cool water
and gasping for breath,
a day of sudden hunger for communion.

Have a day where the crusts you each
were given are lost and you stumble
with your fellows
searching endlessly together. 

Loveliness Found: From Leiv's Facebook wall

I miss home. Where the old woman comes to chase me away from the sea to tell me it's time for lunch. Where playing tag with monstrous waves as the tide rises in the early evening is as common as orange-riddled sunsets. Where everyone knows everyone but not well enough to take the other for granted. Where there's a palatable concoction of the strange and the familiar.

Herman Melville's 1856 U.S. Passport application

"Back then, it was on you to tell the authorities what you looked like. How a person could self-diagnose “Forehead: medium” or “Face: oval” eludes me (what were the other options?), but that might just be one of those things that people knew back then. Another thing they knew, judging by documents related to the Melville application available at Footnote.com, was how to cut through the red tape and go right to the top. Melville addresses William L. Marcy, then the U.S. Secretary of State. The body of the letter is brief: “I am about to visit Europe. Will you be good enough to supply me with a passport? I sail four days hence.” It seemed to work: Melville made it to Europe."
-from this blog, via The New Yorker.

Found:

My traipses into Jonathan Carroll's blog almost always yield loots of beautiful snippets. This morning, I found this there and it just really hit right home:

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other. 

- Osho


Is that beautiful, or what?

May the Holy Week hold for us all a time for reflection.
Peace be with you.

So much loveliness here...

What are regrets?
They're just lessons we haven't learned yet
It's like catching snow on your tongue
You can't pin this butterfly down
Can't pin this butterfly down..


Another day draws away
And my heart sinks with the sun

Stripin'

Lovin' lovin' lovin'

via Joanna Goddard

Found: Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew"

and am lovin' it to bits!!!

Hehe

via thegloss.com