“Looking at me with bloodshot eyes, he asked with frank curiosity, Now, why is a little girl from Bumfuck, Texas, dragging Friedrich Nietzsche—kicking and screaming—into this poem? Like you’re gonna preach. You ain’t no preacher, Mary Karr. You’re a singer.”
Mary Karr, Lit (a memoir)
Things I do I must realize I am not so unique in doing them, and thoughts I think are not so organic as they feel. Our environments influence us, but at what point can one’s own agency influence the environment in which it exists?
A commencement ceremony at a public university and for some reason the archbishop was invited to lead us all in prayer.
I confused.
I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
Barack Obama in an interview with ABC News (via nprfreshair)(via nprfreshair)
That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable, and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.
Joan Didion
“I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”—
Maurice Sendak
An ode to you, for showing me where the wild things are
“By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.. “
[Joan Didion, “Why I Write”]
Driving down the same road I always drive down through a section of the park, I got to thinking about fulfillment, and thinking about it caused me to say it aloud to myself quite a bit, which then made me realize how strange of a word it is. A common praise to hear is, “We hope you live a fulfilled life” — well, what does that even mean? Can fulfillment only be positive, or is it more fluid and takes the shape of the context in which is lies?
The realization in which I stumbled upon is that we are ultimately the ones allowing fulfillment to occur—maybe it’s too much negativity everywhere, and maybe for an already cynical person that could be the perfect fuel to a fire they wish to keep burning.
The great oxymoron within this is that what moves us to find fulfillment in life the most is the recognition of death.
