"Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith’s opposite....

...He was articulate, but he never made speech seem effortless; on the contrary, he
exhibited what hard work it was—to make his faith, in tandem with his doubt, clear; to speak well, in spite of his stutter."

-John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Death and solider by hans larwin
1917

For my mind was hardly ripe
I tailed him and his blessed pipe

This is about The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Think I made it sound dirty.😅

Its International Women's Day.

Let us all daily celebrate motherhood, sisterhood, wifehood and above all, womanhood.

I hate that tiny bumps send my ship askew
The faintest wind rocks my boat
Drizzles cause my eyes to dew
And my house is eager to fall apart

These gentle waves that tear my sails
They're child's play in others' tales

Stretch Your Wings

There is a whole universe out there
Beyond the window through which you stare
But as you slumber in your bed of hay
Your dream will pass you by

So break free, songbird, for here
Your hums remain unheard

Take off, caged one
Stretch Your Wings
Shake off the monotony of your days

Leave your nest
And live with zest
Dare to try
New things to best

'Cause down yonder
Beyond the haze
There're roses to smell
And stars to gaze

Rules to break
Worries to mind
Wounds to nurse
Lovers to find

-My cheesy poems coming out of the wood work today

I have to resist the illusion of a clean resume
The one that buries dirty socks behind clean garments and smiles
My polished shoes are deceitful
Only I know where they've been
Where my toes dipped
And my eyes have seen

We'll eventually show ourselves
One frizzy strand at a time

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

-William Blake

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair.

But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time.

-The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

Tis a fearful/terrible thing to love what death can touch.

-Yehuda Halevi

It is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

-Donna Tartt

being the person who remembers everything creates an exhaustion that’s hard to explain to people who’ve never carried that role. the exhaustion is cause not just because of having a good memory or general organisation in life but it tends to leek into your functioning as the failsafe system for multiple people’s lives while personal needs get perpetually deferred because someone has to make sure the important things actually happen. birthdays get remembered, appointments get scheduled, plans get followed through on, details get tracked, promises get kept—all of this runs through one person’s mental infrastructure while everyone else gets to be spontaneous and forgetful and generally unburdened by the anxiety that things might fall apart if someone isn’t paying attention.

what makes chronic responsibility so depleting is that it operates subtly until something goes wrong. when everything runs smoothly, the work of making it run smoothly disappears into the background and looks like things just naturally working out rather than like the result of constant vigilance and management. nobody notices your mental labor of tracking everyone’s schedules or the emotional work of anticipating needs before they become problems or the strategic planning required to prevent the small disasters that would happen if someone wasn’t thinking three steps ahead. the responsibility only becomes visible through its absence, which means the chronically responsible person is essentially working a second unpaid job that only gets acknowledged when they stop doing it and everything immediately starts falling apart.

Friday 13th🫠

Watch some horror tonight!

Or at least have a night mare!

Amharic book titles are getting out of hand. I feel like I'm casting spells.