Last night was not a good night for sleep. I tossed restless most of the night and finally got out of bed around 5 am. I had my big boy breakfast, and have been at the computer not writing for the past hour. I can’t settle on anything to write, at least not now. Thumbing through journals and the notes on my phone, I figured, maybe I could write some phrases and clippings. I don’t always know where they came from – if they belong to someone else’s mind, my own, or a combination of the two….
How We Disappeared
She was an accidental saint. I wanted to know her obsessions
She was a butterfly, beating her wings against my sky, my serious breeze in the afternoon light. – Modification of a line from Veronica
There will be things you never asked her – oh how they tear at you now – Ben Howard
All the new thinking is about loss. In this, it resembles all the old thinking. – Robert Hass
Desire is full of endless distances. – Robert Hass
Dinosaur moves… Robot moves
To You, To us.
Miss You, Kiss You
Nobody wants to be in love alone
She had an art show walk
There is a heart tied down by roots. There is a machete hacking away, trying to set it free.
Clippings about Home
What is Home? My favorite definition is “a safe place,” a place where one is free from attack, a place where one experiences secure relationships and affirmation. It’s a place where people share and understand each other. Its relationships are nurturing. The people in it do not need to be perfect; instead, they need to be honest, loving, supportive, recognizing a common humanity that makes all of us vulnerable. – Gladys Hunt
It doesn’t matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again. Once you’ve started to leave, you will run your whole life. – Charlotte Erickson
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness. – Margaret Atwood
Home is where somebody notices you are no longer there. – Aleksander Hemon
Home is the nicest word there is. – Laura Ingalls
The desire to go home, that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cause to speak and be perfectly understood. – Rebecca Solnit
If light is in your heart, you will find your way home. – Rumi
The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home. – Terry Pratchett
In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world. They follow us, like shadows, until we come upon them again, waiting for us in the mist. – Ari Berk
I wanted to cry because I needed you there with me so bad. I knew in that moment that I was in love with you. I was in love with the way you loved me. When you wrapped your arms around me and held me, I knew that no matter what happened with my life, you were my home. You stole the biggest piece of my heart that night. – Colleen Hoover
Travel does not exist without home… If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world. – Josh Gates
This entire time I’ve been thinking about where my home was. At first it was California, then Wisconsin. But in truth, home isn’t necessarily where you sleep at night. It’s where you feel like yourself. Where you’re most comfortable. Where you don’t have to pretend, where you can just be you. – Elizabeth Eulberg
Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this is what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again. – Tayari Jones
I don’t mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don’t regard a home as a… well, as a place, a building… a house… of wood, bricks, and stone. I think of home as being a thing that two people have between them in which they can… well, nest. – Tennessee Williams
That’s what so many people didn’t understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake worlds, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes. – Orson Scott Card
It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but it was deeper than that. A sense of belonging to a place I never knew I wanted but somehow always needed. It was a home that carried a heartbeat. – Nikki Rowe