View Larger We love the place we hate,
then hate the place we love
We leave the place we love,
then spend a lifetime trying to regain it
View Larger We love the place we hate,
then hate the place we love
We leave the place we love,
then spend a lifetime trying to regain it
I can write my words into musical notes
with a lack of creativity
gimme the words, I’ll draw the notes
Simple, without a tune, I’ll give you rhythm.
I’d like to play with your instrumentation,
though really we could just skip that.
Let’s write some music.
More words on a page.
Rhythms not like heartbeats
because that’s too old fashioned.
I don’t want romantic slow beats,
I like punctuated sounds with rests and holds,
Like catching your breath in the middle of a song;
even pianists forget to breath.
Hands move over keys; hands move over bodies.
Mistakes are made and notes are dropped.
The music sometimes stops short.
Redos don’t really work outside of the practice room.
I can play one bar twenty times til my head spins but at least,
my fingers got it.
People don’t work that way.
There is no replay, no practice session alone,
with love there is no pause long enough, there is no coda.
What’s played is played.
Everyone is listening.
They can hear you skip a note in love more
than they can hear it in the music
(I’ve played enough horrible pieces that have ended in applause
to know that).
When playing with love,
you’re always on the stage.
And sometimes there is no applause.
There is no encore.
You leave your music behind.
It’s not love’s existence that makes it special, it’s the fact that it can expire. Like life, love is a lot of hormones and a stroke of luck. That’s why you tend to hang onto it: because you were so lucky to have that experience in the first place. And also like life, you hold the power in…
In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go?
— Siddhārtha Gautama (via observedintoexistence)
Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
— C.S. Lewis (via 500-daysoftumblr)










Overload of Group Pictures
I’m sorry that I’ve forgotten where credit is due for many of these pictures. I hope that’s ok. These past six months have been some of the most challenging of my life (I may have already stated this twenty times) and I wouldn’t of been able to get through it all without the support of all of these people. In the past six months we have shared lunch, taken classes, complained about those classes, rode public transportation, traveled all around Ecuador and even out of the country, complained about the food, shared stories about our host families (good and bad), drank together, occasionally a few of us cried together, laughed so, so much together, and through it all supported each other. I couldn’t have asked for a better group. I appreciate both our small eight person Ecology group (Tiputini would not have worked out so well any other way) and our large entire group. Now that most of them are back in the United States, I can fully appreciate how much these people mean to me and how much I hope that we’ll all stay close when we’re back at K. We made it through Ecuador. And that takes a lot.
So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love—loving the loving of things whose existence she didn’t care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.
— Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated