Alena > Recent Status Updates

... and I think
of that feeling when you're really full, or life is full
and you can't think of anything else that would fit in it,
but then even more sky comes and more days
and there is so much to remember and swallow.
(Someplace Like Montana)

He has this feeling, with women, that it's hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn't feel like something that's already happened, and will probably happen again in some very similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake.

Now I, an under-tenant of the earth, can see
That the branches of a tree
Spread no wider than its roots.
And how shall the soul of a man
Be larger than the life he has lived?

You may think, passer-by, that Fate
Is a pit-fall outside of yourself,
Around which you may walk by the use of foresight
And wisdom.
...
But pass on into life:
In time you shall see Fate approach you
In the shape of your own image in the mirror;

The tongue may be an unruly member --
But silence poisons the soul.
Berate me who will -- I am content.

But that was how my life felt to me just then, like a boat already burning. Treacherous and bright, too far from any shore.

I had been a liar, always, and on stage lies were beautiful, necessary. They told a kind of truth.

I was young then and so hungry for experience that some days I could taste it like blood in the back of my throat. This is what I'll admit: I wanted it. All of it. I did this to myself.

He feels relatively safe here, though he is aware as he walks the circumference of the carnival that he is also pacing along the wall of a zoo's enclosure. Protected and yet trapped. Included and collected.

I think of the things I decided to carry, and how I had to make myself strong enough to do so, and then I think of my mum again. She was very loving in the beginning, but grief severs things.

Loving a place is the same as having a child. They are both too much an act of hope, of defiance. And those are fool's weapons.

Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life's restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark, confused world the Kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.

You must be willing to challenge unjust mores, to champion unpopular causes, and to buck the status quo. You are called to be salt of the earth. You are to be the light of the world. You are to be that vitally active leaven in the lump of the nation.

No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.

The moment passes but you stay in the shape you were then In the life that's come out of the things that you did The remainder of that girl you used to be is gone
They don't tell you How could they How could anyone make any sense of that

We're all different, but we all think everyone else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel like the world would be a happier place.

Life at that time was like walking on a path made of spinning tops You took a step you were spun off one way The next step spun you off another Every moment was the moment when everything changed

Listening to her was like walking through a blizzard, a storm of frenzied white nothings that left you snow-blind.

Only quiet is a different beast when it finds you. A perfecting of thing until you have it and it turns on you.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
"Love in Action"

His goodness was found ... not in the moral pilgrimage that reached its destination point, but in the love ethic by which he journeyed life's highways.

Getting to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

...
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.
...
"Tecumseh"

Even when an extraordinary book ends at precisely the right point, with precisely the right words, and anything further would only destroy that perfection, it still leaves us wanting more pages. That is the paradox of reading.

Authority and money surround themselves with silence and one can measure the reach of someone's influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them.

Look, I want to love this world
as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
"October"

Not because I wasn't proud of my Mexican heritage. Sometimes I was just too tired to defend it. ...
As a kid I was ashamed about not being white enough. But as an adult, I was ashamed for not being Mexican enough.

...
Inside the house
it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight
in which I'm sitting.

I do not close the book.

Neither, for a long while, do I read on.
"The Loon"

After a while, I stopped existing. I stopped counting the seconds or imagining our arrival. My thoughts and my muscles were weeping. My fatigue and my bones were weeping.

One thing I wanted to avoid (one among many others, like dying) was people taking advantage of me.