Decompose on forest floor study (embroidered drawing)

January 31, 2023


Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.

– Natalie Goldberg

February 1, 2023

February 2, 2023


February 3, 2023

February 4, 2023

February 5, 2023

I hope that when I die I too may be permitted to pay at once my oldest outstanding debt, to restore promptly the minerals and salts that have been lent to me for the little while that I have use for blood and bone and flesh.
Louise Dickinson Rich


February 6 , 2023

When the sun sets, shadows that shew’d at noon.
But small, appear most long and terrible:
So when we think fate hovers o’er our heads,
Our apprehensions shoot beyond all bounds:
Owls, ravens, crickets seem the watch of death:
Nature’s worst vermin scare her god-like sons.
Echoes, the very leavings of a voice,
Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves.

Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus;
While we, fantastic dreamers, heave and puff,
And sweat with our imagination’s weight
.

– Samuel Richardson, 1747

February 7, 2023