“…In plays and poems someone understands

there’s something makes us more than blood and bone

and more than biological demands…”

— Neil Gaiman

“the little things? the little moments?
they aren’t so little.”

— John Zabat-Zinn

“On the beach, at dawn:
four small stones clearly
hugging each other.

How many kinds of love
might there be in the world,
and how many formations might they make

and who am I ever
to imagine I could know
such a marvelous business?”

— Mary Oliver, On the Beach

“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by… Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back… We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.”

— Danusha Laméris

“My time of the year, November. The month when I re-read books, leaf through papers, gather notes. It’s a kind of hunger for work, for activity, for taking up all the old tasks once again. And that damp organic smell in the morning when I go out — and the warm halos of lamplight in the evening when I return …”

—Mihail Sebastian

“It is a kind of love, is it not?

I’ve been thinking about the patience of ordinary things.

And towels drink the wet

from the skin of the back.”

—Pat Schneider

“Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.”

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”

— James Baldwin

“I partake of the sun.”

—Rebecca Lindenberg

“I want real things. Live people to take hold of, to see and talk to. Music that makes holes in the sky. I want to love as hard as I can.”

— Georgia O’Keeffe

They have palmetto trees up north of the Florida state line:

their trunks are watchful. It always feels like taller

trees have more wisdom than others. Maybe it’s just because

they’re lonelier. Or maybe I am seeing a heated mirage.