Assumptions are the termites of all relationship and self consciousness kills communication.
“Your soulmate is not someone who comes into your life peacefully. It is who comes to make you question things, who changes your reality, somebody that marks a before and after in your life. It is not the human being everyone has idealized, but an ordinary person, who manages to revolutionize your world in a second.”
Our First Apartment
An iron-barred
plant-laden window,
guarded by the Buddha,
gating out the world.
Cold sunlight
on warm wooden floors
scratched up by a table
built for building a community
together.
Teacups.
Boardgames.
Blankets from your sister.
Books.
So many books
color coded and marked up,
separating you from me and here from
there
and
A couch you hated, and
the art.
Bay windows and
the bedroom walls
soaked with words
from whispered conversations
that drew us
deep
into the night and
into each other.
I didn’t realize it,
when we first moved in.
I swear,
It didn’t look like a battleground.
“When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.” – Orson Scott Card
There is a great podcast interview with Laura Dern where she talks about actively seeking out characters who she initially hates, often out of a desire to understand them, and hopefully come to love them.
Better to be alone than in bad company.
This is just a reminder to myself to evaluate the relationships I am maintaining in my life. Are they nourishing relationships or am I giving time out of obligation?
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi
Italo Calvino on the Inferno and Suffering
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Italo Calvino