first snowfall
luckily I am here
at home
—Basho
The Dust of the Ground
Before they’re plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as you meet them, and others wait for a little while. You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.
—Practicalities, Marguerite Duras
Grace
Where each of us may find the sources of consolation when thus afflicted by a loss is a question of personal experience and fate. I hope that somewhere in the thicket of your sprawling pain you may come upon the small spring that has already cried all the tears before, and, indeed, for you in advance. For it is unthinkable that this ever possible, providential pain, which is so often aimed at and inflicted upon human beings, is inconsolable.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
2025
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching