alyssa > Recent Status Updates

Big Panda reminded me of BTS throughout the whole book and when I turn the final page I see a Big Panda photo card 😭😭💜💜

“Do bad thoughts make me a bad person?”

“No, the waves are not the ocean. The thoughts are not the mind.”

“Autumn is nature’s way of showing us how beautiful letting go can be.”

“Sometimes, you just have to be silly.” Big Panda gets it

“You show your face, your flushed face,
and stones spin with joy.
(…)
When I see your beauty, when I see your virtue,
I don’t need those two or three hanging lanterns,
I don’t need the moon.
The old rusty heavens are no mirror for your face.
You breathe in, you exhale, and from the tied up, tightfisted world, a new world is born.”

“even the wind
stirring the leaves says to trust
instinct’s music. I walk to unravel
panic’s thousand fingers braided through
my insides—false roots.”


“Grief lives a new life
as devotion.”

I found this at a secondhand bookstore and it is so heavily annotated by the previous owner, I’m about to have a blast I love an annotated book!!!

“His voice is deep,
then he lifts it until it seems
to fall from the sky.
I am thrilled.
I am grateful.”

“And I suggest them to you also, that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained—are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”

“As though his subject now
was his true self,
which of course was as dark and secret
as anyone else’s,
and it was too hard—

perhaps you understand—
to speak or to sing it
to anything or anyone
but the sky.”

The Mockingbird is one of my favorites ;-;

“The vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?”

The first time Percy came back is one of my favorite poems of Miss Oliver’s 😭💛

“For some things
there are no wrong reasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.”

“The one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.”

“You fuss over life with your clever
words, mulling and chewing on its meaning, while
we just live it.
Could anyone figure it out, to a finality? So
why spend so much time trying. You fuss, we live.”

“I’m half crazy with the wonder
of it—the abundance of the leaves, the
quietness of the branches, the hopelessness
of my effort. And I am in that delicious
and important place, roaring with laughter,
full of earth-praise.”

“Sorrow walks into every room,
bangs on the piano.”

“I only have desire.”

“I will enjoy this life. I will open it
like a peach in season, suck the juice
from every finger, run my tongue over
my chin. I will not worry about clichés
or uninvited guests peering in my windows.
I will love and be loved. Save and be saved
a thousand times. I will let the want into
my body, bless the heat under my skin.
My life, I will not waste it. I will enjoy this life.”

“Because
I need you, you appear to me, not
often, however. I live essentially
in darkness. You are perhaps training me to
be
responsive to the slightest brightening.”

“Feelings:
oh I have those: they
govern me.”

“Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.”

“I didn’t know my voice
if one were given me
would be so full of grief, my sentences
like cries strung together.
I didn’t even know I felt grief
until that word came, until I felt
rain streaming from me.”

“This life
is built almost entirely
of love

and losing,

isn’t it?”

“I make another case—being depressed, yes, but in a sense passionately
attached to the living tree, my body
actually curled in the split trunk, almost at peace, in the evening rain
almost able to feel
sap frothing and rising”

Rereading because I need some love

“What if, instead of carrying a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”

“I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.”

“How desperate I would be
if I couldn’t remember
the sun rising, if I couldn’t
remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t
even remember, beloved,
your beloved name.”