I will touch you with my mind

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, circa 1839-1846 (Houghton Library, Harvard)

𝙹𝚞𝚗𝚎 𝟷𝟿, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟼 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟺-𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟹

I’m not everything I want to be, but I’m more than I was, and I’m still learning. Charlotte Eriksson, Everything Changed When I Forgave Myself

There is no more powerful fantasy than the fantasy of what might have been. John Burnside, from ‘The Dumb House’

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

Shira Barzilay, A Crazy Night in the Museum, 2022

“There are a few things in life so beautiful they hurt: swimming in the ocean while it rains, reading alone in empty libraries, the sea of stars that appear when you’re miles away from the neon lights of the city, bars after 2am, walking in the wilderness, all the phases of the moon, the things we do not know about the universe, and you.” — Beau Taplin, and you.

Colette (2018) Dir. Wash Westmoreland #Lookatmelookingatyou

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

when phoebe bridgers sang, “talking on a rusty swing set / after a while / you went quiet, and i got mean / always pushing you away from me” and when mitski sang, “i get mean when i'm nervous / like a bad dog” and when the japanese house sang, “i was wrong, i was mean / i created such a scene / and my demons within / but i’m changing” but also? when ari wonders abt dante, “i didn’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you.” 

“Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say “going through the motions”—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always arise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work.” — Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

— Harvey (1950), dir. Harry Koster

when john berger said that the small things we do for each other are ‘commas of care’ and thinking now of every book that has been recommended to me and every song i’ve loved that has been shared with me and every movie i’ve watched because someone dear adored it and each one of those is a stitch in time, bright and gleaming, in whatever the pattern is of our own little lived-in tapestry of lives, and a placeholder for love bc when i come back to all these things, i come back to the love that gave them to me first, commas of care that let you pause and go on.

“The precious intimacy of little things.” — Daphné du Maurier, I Will Never Be Young Again