A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L’Engle
“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.” – Mrs. Whatsit
Find A Wrinkle in Time on Goodreads.
Bird’s Kiss
Bahram Alivandi
Bahram Alivandi (1928 – 2012) received his artistic training in Tehran and is considered a pioneer of Iranian contemporary art. He taught at the Workshop of National Art and the Kamal-ol-Molk Academy of Art for twenty years before his oppositional views toward the government led to his imprisonment. In 1983 he moved to Vienna, Austria, where he lived in exile until his death in 2012. A member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), Alivandi’s life was devoted to the creation of art and the fight for freedom.
More about Bahram Alivandi
Barter
Sara Teasdale
Photo by Toesoxlover
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.
More about Sara Teasdale
Fill Me Up
Sean Colvin
Well, I might be alright if I just see the light
I don’t care if the phone don’t ring
And I’ll know when it’s right like a voice in the night
And the right shade of tangerine
More by Sean Colvin
Healing Quote of the Day
Photo by Rob Carswell
If you don’t create… you will become a menace to society.
–Maria Semple, From Where’d You Go, Bernadette
The Bone People
Keri Hulme
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon’s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity. –From Goodreads
Where is My Mother
Yun Gee
Yun Gee (1906-1963) was a Chinese-American artist, poet, writer and performer. At 15, he left China to join his father in San Francisco and never saw his mother again. Yun Gee studied at the California School of Fine Art and became a U. S. Citizen. At 21 he left for Paris where his work was well received. Merging western and eastern themes and styles, he was the first Chinese artist to exhibit in the established Parisian art salons. On his return to his adopted country, Yun Gee endured years of discrimination in New York City. In 1936 he returned to Paris where he found acceptance, but World War II forced his return to America three years later. In his poem entitled Pigeon, he wrote, “Here I am free by law, people cannot kill me like a chicken. The only thing that makes me tremble, is when a hawk appears over the skyscrapers.”
More about Yun Gee
The Eclipse
Richard Eberhart
Photo Credit to Motjetom
I stood out in the open cold
To see the essence of the eclipse
Which was its perfect darkness.
I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As man’s hope of light in the face of darkness.
More poems by Richard Eberhart
N is for Normal (NO!)
Tammy Petry
Photo by Paul Bevan
Normal is subjective. Normal is relative. Normal is something I hope I’ll NEVER be. Normal is one of the worst names you can call me. To me, normal is boring, conformist, and un-original. It’s everything I AM NOT.
Some people spend thousands of dollars and countless hours of their time trying to be normal. They want to feel normal and look normal. They want to be a carbon copy, cookie cutter image of everyone else.
WHY?
There is beauty in being unique-in being YOU. Why strive to be something you’re not? Why do so many people want to be an artificial dress up doll in a society of cutouts?
There is truth in honoring how you feel and what you believe in. There is freedom and joy in following your own path. I refuse to get in that line of sheeple, those “yes men” and head-nodders. I will not wear what mass media spews over the airwaves. I will not agree with the masses and hold my tongue when everything in my soul screams, “NO, that’s a LIE!”
These are excerpts from something I recently wrote:
“I’m not your pearl clutcher,
not your Stepford Wife…
I don’t want no part of
your cookie-cutter life..
No grey sedans
No minivans…
Gonna shave my head
Dye it Cherry Red…”
Oh, and YES I DID!
Reposted from Diary of a Middle-Aged Misfit