poetry

We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

The car is a private crying area. If you see a person crying near a car, you may need to offer help. If you see a person crying inside a car, you know they are already held.

“I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real,” writes Robert Desnos to his beloved, “I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.”

Paige insists this kind of advice must be ignored: “Don’t trust anyone who says ‘Poetry has had enough of these things.’ Because what they’re actually saying is ‘I have had enough of these things.’ & how could anyone who’s ‘had enough of the moon’ be right about poetry?”43

Empathy can be a hole through which one falls into despair. Tears make the ground slippery. And then what? Satisfaction for the depth of one’s feeling? If I am not myself in danger, then my imagining myself into the place of another’s suffering unnecessarily incapacitates me, makes me unable to move some small part of my day in a direction that

It was when fish became terrestrial amphibians that the body’s lacrimal system first evolved.71 We left the water and began to weep the home we’d abandoned.

We love through connection, but we individualize through solitude.

The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.