Ean

“Fear of failure was the worst thing for any spell.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Slowly the conversation sputtered. We started talking like people who used to be close, catching each other up on our lives rather than living them together. By the time he payed the bill, I knew that whatever we had been, we weren’t anymore.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“St Cuthbert was called to be a hermit on Lindis­farne. This was more than a thousand years ago. There were only small wooden huts there then, and the wind and the wild sea and everything that lived in the wild sea. Cuthbert went out there to the mon­astery, but the monastery was not far enough and he was called out further. He rowed to an empty island, where he ate onions and the eggs of seabirds and stood in the sea and prayed while sea otters played around his ankles. He lived there alone for years, but then he was called back. The King of Northumbria came to him with some churchmen, and they told him he had been elected Bishop of Lindisfarne and they asked him to come back and serve.

There’s a Victorian painting of the king and the her­mit. Cuthbert wears a dirty brown robe and has one calloused hand on a spade. The king is offering him a bishop’s crosier. Behind him, monks kneel on the sands and pray he will accept it. Behind them are the beached sailboats that brought them to the island. The air is filled with swallows. Cuthbert’s head is turned away from the king, he looks down at the ground and his left hand is held up in a gesture of refusal. But he didn’t refuse, in the end. He didn’t refuse the call. He went back.

We head out because the emptiness negates us. We leave the cities and we go to the wild high places to be dissolved and to be small. We live and die at once, the topsoil is washed away and the rock is exposed and it is not possible to play the games anymore. Now I am exposed rock. Like Cuthbert, I have been washed clean. What do I see?”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Beast