Tales

“ If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer. If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in! ”

-- Shel Silverstein

Darn

"... I darn and am looking for holes in people’s clothes and the stories that accompany them; repairing these holes and returning the mended garments. It is a way to briefly make contact with strangers. I am interested in the spaces the body occupies, the tenderness of touch and the ways in which we go about day to day life."

Celia Pym, Hope's sweater, 1951. 

Quote and images from Celia Pym found via Selvedge 

Optimism and Despair

"If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting."

-- Zadie Smith
 A talk given in Berlin on November 10 on receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize.

getting to know me

One of the clearest lessons from contemporary neuroscience is that our sense of ourselves is anchored in a vital connection with our bodies. We do not truly know ourselves unless we can feel and interpret our physical sensations; we need to register and act on these sensations to navigate safely through life. While numbing (or compensatory sensation seeking) may make life tolerable, the price you pay is that you lose awareness of what is going on inside your body and, with that, the sense of being fully sensually alive.

--Bessel Van Der Kolk from The Body Keeps The Score

the snowbed

Jan Von Holleben's The Snowbed is one of the best books on my shelf.