Charissa Berwick

“Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what?

I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Nobody knows you.
You don't know yourself.
And I, who am half in love with you,
What am I in love with?
My own imaginings?”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

“Soldiers planted like vegetables waiting for the day of harvest. … everything is more intense at night, perfectly beautiful, and when the wind shifts and the reek of rotting meat vanishes for a few blessed minutes you can smell the sweet scent of the countryside.”
― Louis de Bernières, The Dust That Falls from Dreams