jessica paul

going to string these into a garland for the mantle.

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:10:44 -0500

going to string these into a garland for the mantle.

Photo

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:50:00 -0500

nutcracker rehearsal - 11.26.11 my little sister, ballerina.

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:50:00 -0500

nutcracker rehearsal - 11.26.11

my little sister, ballerina.

mélanie laurent // début

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:49:40 -0500

mélanie laurent // début

Photo

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:49:00 -0500

"Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of..."

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:03:38 -0500

“Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.  ”

- Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

blue ridge mountains, north carolina - 11.12.11 (I spent a...

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:03:12 -0500

blue ridge mountains, north carolina - 11.12.11

(I spent a morning hiking here this weekend, for the first time since I was a kid. it was even more lovely and breathtaking than I remembered).

fleet foxes // ragged wood the world is alive now, in and...

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:02:49 -0500

fleet foxes // ragged wood

the world is alive now, in and outside our home
you run through the forest, settle before the sun
darling, I can barely remember you beside me
you should come back home, back on your own now

Photo

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:12:52 -0500

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:12:16 -0500

elvis perkins // while you were sleeping full of dreams, you...

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:12:00 -0500

elvis perkins // while you were sleeping

full of dreams, you overslept
and keeping with quiet, through the walls i crept
i walked on tiptoe, sent darkness swirling over all the kitchen in the early morning

harvest moon // neil young

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:04:00 -0400

harvest moon // neil young

"When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the..."

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:00:32 -0400

“

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

”

- Mary Oliver

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:00:22 -0400

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:00:03 -0400

dead leaves and the dirty ground.

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:00:00 -0400

dead leaves and the dirty ground.

"In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether..."

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 09:24:14 -0400

“In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice… which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones.”

- Thoreau, Walking (this essay is certainly worth a read. or re-read, if you are like me and haven’t read it since being forced to in high school English class.)

"In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a..."

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:10:29 -0400

“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

"When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And..."

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:00:00 -0400

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

- When You Are Old William Butler Yeats

"Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself..."

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:35:20 -0400

“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play—I tell you, Dorian, that is on things like these that our lives depend on.”

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray