Once you start noticing how the incapacity to handle discomfort affects how people live their lives it's actually pretty shocking how it ruins pretty much every conceivable aspect of existence. Interpersonal relationships, romantic and platonic. Career and education opportunities. Your politics Your willingness to go anywhere. The kind of food you eat. The kind of art you expose yourself to and your ability to read it. It's never just one thing, it touches everything, and once you notice it it's like suddenly being able to see germs or something. Just this horrific catastrophe people look at you askance for screaming about. As I grow older and see what became of my friends and peers who could not learn to handle discomfort, the more I'm like. This is a genuine societal issue
I think as your job satisfaction gets lower and lower you should gain access to an increasingly broad and powerful suite of forbidden magic
my understanding and interpretation of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” cannot be untangled from the fact that it was originally published to follow her poem about childhood sexual abuse, “Rage”
i just don’t think it was unintentional that these were presented flush against each other
[Transcripts:
Rage
by Mary Oliver
You are the dark song
of the morning;
serious and slow,
you shave, you dress,
you descend the stairs
in your public clothes
and drive away, you become
the wise and powerful one
who makes all the days
possible in the world.
But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child's bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste.
And forever those nights snarl
the delicate machinery of the days.
When the child's mother smiles
you see on her cheekbones
a truth you will never confess;
and you see how the child grows—
timidly, crouching in corners.
Sometimes in the wide night
you hear the most mournful cry,
a ravished and terrible moment.
In your dreams she's a tree
that will never come to leaf—
in your dreams she's a watch
you dropped on the dark stones
till no one could gather the fragments—
in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
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.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
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.
]
'view of naples through a window,' oil on paper, mounted on canvas; framed: 59.5 x 46 x 5.5 cm; franz ludwig catel, german c. 1824.
Kentucky's Walter Sisters from The Traipsin' Woman, Collection, University of Louisville Photographic Archives.
The Beach Boys's Brian Wilson sits alone in a church. (c. 70s/80s, photographer unknown)
Isoda Koryusai
Edo period (1615-1868), circa 1770s
Uma (Horse) from the series Furyu junishi (Fashionable 12 Signs of the Zodiac), unsigned, 24.6cm x 18.4cm (9 11/16in x 7¼in)
A world of washing, Samtsche-Dzjavacheti, Georgia - by Natela Grigalashvili (1965), Georgian
you're too caught up in the metaphor. go run a mile or push something heavy