ts eliot poems

i've been told my blog post with the pictures is confusing and weird...sometimes i forget that not everyone is a huge fan of "the waste land." sorry about that...

so there is this poem by ts eliot called "the waste land" and it is really long and super confusing and full of famous lines like april is the cruellest month and that corpse you planted last year in the garden/has it begun to sprout? and I will show you fear in a handfull of dust. My favorite lines are

My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, have we existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries...

---
the other quote from that post is by Samuel Beckett, who wrote Waiting for Godot, a play in the absurdist style that is basically about the hopelessness and futility of life. Thia and I have been obsessed recently by this idea of being MAD FOR LIFE and I thought the quote about being born mad and *REMAINING* so was an excellent fit. i forgot that not everyone - anyone, really - is privy to our late night discussions about how we can live out our passion for life.

so. pretty much that post was about a late night walk in the mist that Meg, Clare, Thia and I took. we went and walked and soaked in beauty and lived in the present like ... good zen buddhists? like good Christians, really. but this is a discussion for a different day. hah.

we walked and talked and thought about how life is beautiful and vibrant and a gift and meditated on how we want to REMAIN MAD. and i thought about how the awful daring of a moment's surrender (to God, to life, to glorious aliveness) is the thing that matters and it is not what is going to show up in my obituary. when i die, someone will write of me my college and career and accomplishments, and they will in doing this miss the most important parts of my life. most important is those beautiful moments when i realize how lovely life is, how sharply sweet is the smell of fall, how piercingly wonderful is an hour with a friend, how deep joy can run if i just pay attention to what is going on around me.

most people go through life half asleep, yeah? i'm not going to be one of them.