Only Love Remains

“It’s much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn’t stop for anybody. I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everybody was, especially me. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. You can’t just sit their and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things. I’m going to do what I want to do. I’m going to be who I really am. And I’m going to figure out what that is. And we could all sit around and wonder and feel bad about each other and blame a lot of people for what they did or didn’t do or what they didn’t know. I don’t know. I guess there could always be someone to blame. It’s just different. Maybe it’s good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Because it’s okay to feel things. I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite. I feel infinite” 

― Stephen Chbosky

“So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn’t care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.” 
-Jonathan Safran Foer

“The truth is, (for you have a right to know my weaknesses and shall-the whole) –I have so long wrestled with myself like a blind giant stifling by violence all the intensities of my nature that when at last they found vent, and your voice of love proclaimed a deliverance so unlooked for, so full, and free, revealed what I dared [not] hope for, and what I have never for a moment dreamed to be possible-that your heart was and long had been mine-it was as a life touch to one dead; all the pent up tides of my being…broke forth at once and spurned controul.”
-Theodore Weld, Letter to Angelina Grimke 

““…what could be better, really, than to sit by the fire in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the windowpanes, and the lamp burns?… You forget everything and hours go by. Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you’re the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he’s wearing. …Have you ever had the experience while reading a book, of coming upon some vague idea that you’ve had yourself, some obscure image that comes back to you from far away and seems to express absolutely your most subtle feelings?””

— Léon / Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways (Lydia Davis translation)

(Source: lemartien, via fighttheemptywords)

Only Human

People tell me I’m only human.
The words taste bitter in my mouth.
What a cop out.
What an excuse.
Yes. I am only human.
I will mess up. And break hearts. And be heart-broken.
 But what about those millions of humans we ignore?
Those humans…starving, scared, and enslaved…
Is that okay, because they’re…only human?
These humans that oppress them…they’re…only human.
Right?
What if there was just one?
One human in slavery.
One human starving.
One human scared.
Would you pass them by because they were the… only human?
Sometimes I tell myself I’m only human.
Sometimes I feel as if I am the only human- the only person that feels this deep connection to other people. That hurts for them. That loves them.
Sometimes I feel as if I will never make any difference.
Sometimes I feel as if I am the difference.
Sometimes I am filled with fight.
Sometimes I can do nothing but silently resign.
Sometimes I feel as though I can conquer it all.
Sometimes I feel much too small.
I am human.
But that is so much more than you think.
So much more than only.
I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
I was made to love.
I was made to need love. 
I won’t stop.
Because, I’m human.

“Will you be the one to unravel me; Put me back together again? All I got is this tangled heart. Oh my God, where do we begin? We’ve come such a long, long way. I am not gonna stop what we started. I saw it in your eyes that day-a little tired and little disheartened. But honey honey honey- hold me tight till the morning and its light. 
I think that we’ll be fine
I think that we’ll be fine…
If we wish things were different now, we ought to know we’d be lyin’.”
-Us and Our Daughters

“Think about it, there must be higher love -down in the heart and in the stars above.
Without it, life is wasted time. Look inside your heart, I’ll look inside mine. Things look so bad everywhere; In this whole world, what’s fair? We walk blind and we try to see. Falling behind in what could be. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Bring me a higher love. Where’s this higher love, I’ve been thinking of?”
-James Vincent McMorrow

“Put your dreams away for now; I won’t see you for some time. I am lost in my mind
I get lost in my mind. Momma once told me, You’re already home where you feel loved
I am lost in my mind. I get lost in my mind.”
-The Head and The Heart

“Ideas hang before me. Oh, but a breath away.They flicker into being and then begin to fade. And when I’m tired of sitting, I drag my bones to bed. And when I’m tired of sleeping, I think of them instead. They’re only words-Don’t have to shout to be heard. I have not seen the light, for days. Like icarus before me, these wings are not my own. And I am soaring skyward, just to tumble home. Moment has gone. I’m not the best at moving on. Nothing to say, no one would listen anyway. Anyway, I have not seen the light, for days.”
-The Staves

“Humming Hallelujah in the dark. Whispered poems leave you to be. Humming Hallelujah in the night. The sun might rise, as sometimes does it fall. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Stranger you’ve followed me so far- Until the roads converged, as did the stars. Stranger the moon looks blue tonight. Your photo framed, raw within my mind, but not tonight.”
-Katie Costello

Perhaps more than anything else, I love music for the lyrics. When I can’t put into my own words what I’m thinking or feeling, I find them in other songs. This week has been one of those times when I can’t find words. These are a few lyrics that I’ve sung along with this week. 

“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.”

—J. Krishnamurti