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Happy birthday.

footfalls echo in the memory

Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take
towards the door we never opened
into the rose garden. My words echo
thus, in your mind.

Four Quartets, T S Eliot

no longer a need to say it

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres—
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

Four Quartets, T S Eliot

in a dark time

In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

cyclic existence

...as attachment develops for one desire, ends, and then develops for another desire.

painting

Painting’s analogy to skin isn’t new:
the painted surface is a hide where battle-scars remain as a record of its experiences.

Hanneline Rogeberg