Anna B
@annabwriting
Anna B
@annabwriting
The End and the Beginning
By Wisława Szymborska
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop
... See moreThis is the best poem on war I think I have ever read.
I took a medium-sized bottle of Jim Beam and drank from it under the covers while reading No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton. Without God, we are no longer persons. We become dumb animals under pain, happy if we can behave at least like quiet animals and die without too much confusion.
The Eightfold Path, however, is holistic. Each branch is intrinsically linked, and intended to be followed concurrently. Without understanding the seven other forms of guidance, let alone practising them, mindfulness becomes stripped of its essential meaning
“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of
... See moreWhat remains? Most of the sentence, and of course the crucial dash, which is the sveltest emblem possible of the license afforded to the sick, to the essayist, and to the sentence itself. “On Being Ill” contains one of Woolf’s boldest essayistic deviations
Found Philadelphia photos