U N A

“I love her,” Rice said. “I love her so much. And I love her so much that I love that she hasn’t spoken to me—because even in that I have learned so much over the last two years.”

“There is a lovely idea in the Celtic tradition that if you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition, there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.”

“All through your life, the most precious experiences seem to vanish. Transience turns everything to air. You look behind and see no sign even of a yesterday that was so intense. Yet in truth, nothing ever disappears, nothing is lost. Everything that happens to us in the world passes into us. It all becomes part of the inner temple of the soul and it can never be lost. This is the art of the soul: to harvest your deeper life from all the seasons of your experience. This is probably why the soul never surfaces fully. The intimacy and tenderness of its light would blind us. We continue in our days to wander between the shadowing and the brightening, while all the time a more subtle brightness sustains us. If we could but realize the sureness around us, we would be much more courageous in our lives. The frames of anxiety that keep us caged would dissolve. We would live the life we love and in that way, day by day, free our future from the weight of regret.”

Heather Christle in the October Issue of Poetry Magazine

• photography by Amanda Vincelli

“Shelley set up a study inside the house, but was exhilarated by the open skies and the clouds that would glide in from the west, bringing in sudden storms. Before long he found a woodland stream where he felt free to shed the trappings of civilization. In a letter to his friend Peacock, he described his routine: My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain—a practice in the hot weather exceedingly refreshing. This torrent is composed as it were, of a succession of pools and waterfalls, up which I sometimes amuse myself by climbing when I bathe, and receiving the spray over all my body… This picture Shelley painted of himself helps explain why those who met him were struck by his mad originality, his playfulness, or, as they called it, his genius. Who else sat on a wet rock, naked, reading ancient Greek? For that matter, who plunged into pools of water without knowing how to swim and then described the whole scene to prim English friends? Only Shelley, who was constantly on the lookout for inspiration, doing whatever he could to invoke the muses.”