A Myth in Creation

'I'm in love with the shape of you.' Ed Sheeran means it in a physical sense (inferring from the song context), but I would like to interpret it in a non-physical way, as referring to form of the psychological self. What a beautiful, poetic thing to say to someone.

'I don't want to know who I am without you.' (from the song Agape - Bose City Sets by Bear's Den) It strikes me that there are at least two, closely related, ways of interpreting this sentence: 1) 'I don't want to know what sort of a person I'll become if we are no longer together.' 2) 'I don't want to continue on/embark on the journey of self-discovery if you are not by my side.'

Ember: Funny how life-stories sound so much more pathological when they are laid out sequentially. And how we rationalize everything. Writing it all down like that I am like 'crap, that looks pathological'. Internally though, it just was . And was the norm . Me: I really dislike the word 'pathological' when it comes to our psychological lives. It may make sense as a metaphor (one of the arguments Szasz made) but that's really all it is. And what I dislike even more is what this word does to us, to our narratives of ourselves. Yes, we make mistakes, we have irrational fears and we are driven by insecurities, and we have difficulties being open and vulnerable, but that is the human condition. That is you, me, literally everyone out there, in various stages of trauma and healing and growth. Pathology is the deprivation and break-down of meaning; your life is anything but that. You are right though... often when things remain just in our heads, they make a lo

"That night, I had an odd realization: Some of the greatest romances of my life have been friendships. And these friendships have been, in many ways, more mysterious than erotic love: more subtle, less selfish, more attuned to kindness." Victor Lodato in NYT Modern Love

I guess at this point in my life my metaphysical view of God is more poetry than it is either religion or philosophy.

"What is more beautiful, my love? Love lost or love found? Don't laugh at me, my love. I know it, I'm awkward and naive when it comes to love, and I ask questions straight out of a pop song. This doubt overwhelms me and undermines me, my love. To find... or to lose? All around me, people don't stop yearning. Did they lose or did they find? I can't say. An orphan has no way of knowing. An orphan lacks a first love. The love for his mama and papa. That's the source of his awkwardness, his naiveté. You said to me, on that deserted beach in California, "you can touch my legs." But I didn't do it. There, my love, is love lost. That's why I've never stopped wondering, since that day: where have you been? Where you are now? And you, shining gleam of my misspent youth, did you lose or did you find? I don't know. And I will never know. I can't even remember your name, my love. And I don't have the answer. But this is how I like to

'A stitch near god, I chase the Burger King crown blowing down the empty early morning's snowy street.' Susan Firer,  Repetition Works for the Moon

'Things live long in the winds of poems.' Susan Firer, Repetition Works for the Moon

And what better way to celebrate than with an enunciation of romantic pessimism! "Maturity doesn’t suggest we give up on crushes. Merely that we definitively give up on the founding romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of relationships and marriage has been based for the past 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can solve all our needs and satisfy our yearnings. We need to swap the Romantic view for the Tragic Awareness of Love, which states that every human can be guaranteed to frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us – and we will (without any malice) do the same to them.... The failure of one particular partner to be the ideal Other is not – we should always understand – an argument against them ; it is by no means a sign that the relationship deserves to fail or be upgraded. We have all necessarily, without being damned, ended up with that figure of our nightmares, ‘the wrong person.’ Romantic pessimism simply takes it for granted tha

"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full." Marcel Proust,  In Search of Lost Time

'In a long-ago interview with Bill Moyers, Maya Angelou revealed her theory that most women marry other people’s husbands. She didn’t elaborate, but I immediately understood. Out of hopefulness, impatience, insecurity or for a thousand other reasons, we too often rush into relationships that are poor fits for us, robbing our partners and ourselves of more promising connections. It struck me as likely that those of us with disabilities are especially susceptible to this. "I have finally married my own husband," Ms. Angelou went on to say.' Ona Gritz, Love, Eventually in The New York Times

Photograph by  Catsurin at DeviantArt 3D model by Gretchen Alarkon Drawing by  Jeremy Osborne at DeviantArt

"One of the most beautiful photographs I know of is an image of a woman standing in the doorway of a barn, backlit in a sheer nightgown, peeing on the floorboards beneath her. It was taken in Danville, Virginia, in 1971, by the photographer Emmet Gowin, and the woman in question is his wife, Edith. The picture is so piercingly intimate that I find it difficult even to look at it...." Chris Wiley, in The New Yorker

Since feeling is first e. e. cummings since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry – the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says we are for each other; then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

"In the end I really thought I could just walk away from it, a little bruised, but no real harm done." Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

Untitled (Meursault and Marie in the Sea), 1966 Untitled, (Meursault at the Window), 1966 More here .