Ben

“The cheap knick-knack in his hands now carried with it a sentiment of the present he would cherish, and a reminder of the past he would always loathe. Only the finest art could accomplish both those things at once.”
― Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

“Could you refuse me if I asked you to point again at the horizon, to tell me something was worth waiting for?”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems