she flies with her own wings

Okay, promise me two things. One: That you won’t move away to Michigan. And two: That you’ll always love me more than him.

As far as the first one goes, it’s really Austin’s decision. But as far as the second…Well I wouldn’t worry too much about that one.

“Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it.” —Anne Sexton, The Poet Of Ignorance 

“I am afraid to own a Body—” —Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems

“Why must we have bodies?” —Jean Paul Sartre, Intimacy

[Plus: Listen to Where Does A Body End by Swans]

“Let love / be the light that shows again / the blossom to the root.”

“It was dark, then it was dark again. It was dark so long we thought the day was lost.”

“The first section of Darkness is the densest, Dear — After that, Light trembles in —”

“Following a fearful night I do not quite remember came a kind / of dawn, not light, / But something we could see by.”

“There is nothing to be done but to go ahead with life moment by moment … try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside of me.”

“Love is not consolation, it is light.”

“This night (she pointed to herself) is irreparable, but where you are (pointed at me) it’s still light.”

“This is the way of love, to survive only in perpetual loss.”

“I have thought of you often since the darkness,”

“This is us. This is all of us. Before we knew this life would shatter, moving wild and unwanted through the dark and the light.”

“…there are still so many people of courage who go on fighting in spite of all these reasons for despair.”

“Still, a great deal of light falls on everything.”

“No, the abyss isn’t infinite. A half-light lurks even there.”

“I hope you have the power of hope,”

“Maybe this is what love is, / And always will be, all my life. / Whispering, I give her an inch of hope / To bite on, like a bullet.”

“Alas, I know that these consolations amount to so little, for they are quickly used up and the heartache incessantly replenishes on its own.”

“Everyone is dying, everything is dying, and the earth is dying all, eaten up by the sun and the wind. I don’t know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. Let us love each other to the end.”

“Tenderness is always timely.”

“You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves. / Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile, the world goes on.”

“How lightly we learn to hold hope, as if it were an animal that could turn around and bite your hand. And still we carry it the way a mother would, carefully, from one day to the next.”

“Make it your ambition to take heart.”

“Faith, not fear, she said. She’d heard that once and was trying to stamp the phrase on her mind. At the time, she couldn’t speak it aloud.”

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

“Tonight there is no ocean that does not sing. Even sorrow, which we have felt again in all our lands, has hands.”

“In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.”

“This is the human way, she thought. On the edge of destruction, at the end of all things, we still dance. And hope.”

Spencer Finch - 366, Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year (2009)

This work is based on Emily Dickinson in 1862, when she wrote 366 poems in 365 days. It is a real-time memorial to that year, which burns for exactly one year. The sculpture is comprised of 366 individual candles arranged in a linear sequence, each of which burns for 24 hours. The colour of each candle matches a colour mentioned in the corresponding poem. For the poems in which no colour is mentioned, the candles are made out of natural paraffin.

Yeah, I don’t know her work, but the results of this were pretty cool.