Pure-hearted geese . . .

In Freya's day's mailbox . . .

Your life doesn’t have to be in turmoil to write … but you need to be outside of it. That’s why a lot of people, me myself included, write … when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who’s never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.

The world don’t need any more songs [or poems, novels, paintings]… As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain’t gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares. There’s enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred songs, and never be repeated. Unless someone’s gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That’s a different story. – Bob Dylan in Maria Popova's Marginalian

One must lose sight of the shore, sometimes for quite a while, in order to discover new lands. – André Gide

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. [There is a way where] we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down. —Pema Chödrön

The hanging man

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:

A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.

If he were I, he would do what I did.

Sylvia Plath, in Ariel, Faber and Faber, 1968

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

– Mary Oliver, from “Wild Geese,” Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.