Shel > Recent Status Updates

“Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.”

"There are worse things, I think, than leaving a task undone. The oak forests of the world would not exist if squirrels did not lose track of acorns."

I'm blazin' through this. It's hilarious. I see what you were all on about.

"I give thanks for the wise qualities of the evergreen trees that have stood by me this day: may you show my show my own heart can be evergreen and growing through winters of doubt and darkness."

"In the green morning / I wanted to be a heart. / A heart." Federico Garcia Lorca, "Ditty of First Desire"

"Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong. The tragedy is not the failed world's barren ugliness. Te tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails. Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world."

"The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty."

"The future no longer spreads out before me like an endless opportunity, like a sensible vessel for any plans I might conceive."

"Touching the world, healing it, and repairing it in our daily actions is a spiritual practice. It is also a form of courage. Here is one more definition of vegetarianism: Believing in the small, invisible, daily path of peace."

"We are creatures built for joy. At the very saddest of funerals, we can hear a funny story about our lost beloved, and, God help us, we laugh. We can stagger out of an appointment where a person in a white coat has given us news we think we cannot bear to hear, and still we smile at the baby in the checkout line...This is who we are the very best of who we are."

Very pretty book. "For him there is an entire world that exists beyond my ken, and in this matter he is not unique. For every living thing, there is a world that exists beyond my ken." --Praise Song for the Dog's Marvelous Nose

"And that's part of our trouble. Thinking things are inevitable. Not believing change is possible." — A quote from the character Lenore Dove at the very beginning of the book is something Rebecca Solnit has been saying.

Love the setting, rain-soaked mossy Oregon.

I am totally reading this book because it is about a woman and her dog — and then the dog turns out to have a cute name, Moss, and then it turns out to be a small black cocker spaniel with brown eyes. 10/10 recommend

Absolutely beautiful.

Prince Zorander in his "robe of dead things": "...cloth-of-gold, and the hides and furs of a great many animals, which might otherwise have been living their own lives."

A unicorn reconstructed from bones, rainbow skull, black unicorn. "Evidently Tanaquil's world was all wrong, a place where you could only live by murdering other creatures. Every animal preyed on another...In the perfect world there was a perfect food which all ate. It was not alive. It did not have to be attacked or slaughtered."

Jason Schneiderman, Staircase

"You can gently feel and bond with the lichen" Manifesto of Fragility/Terraform, Erika Meitner

"With my sacred power I am traveling." Navaho, Blessing Way

"always on the verge/ of flowering/ into a future/ that will not reliably come" — Taking the Magnolia, Paisley Rekdal