• American Journalist: If you were to give advice to a woman, what would it be?
• Edith Piaf: Love
• American Journalist: To a young girl?
• Edith Piaf: Love
• American Journalist: To a child?
• Edith Piaf: Love.
• American Journalist: Who are you knitting for?
• Edith Piaf: Whoever will wear my sweater.

love, love this image! (edith piaf, 1949)
interview via here
and a song: chante moi

I see thee better in the dark,
I do not need a light.
The love of thee a prism be
Excelling violet.

poem: emily dickinson
Part Five: The Single Hound, LXXIX

image: here

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

― Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

— image: here

My only advice for you is this. Go within yourself and probe the depths from which your life springs, and there at its source you’ll find the answer to the question of whether you must write. Accept this answer, just as you hear it, without hesitation. It may be revealed that you are called to be an artist. Then take this lot upon you, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without asking for any external reward. For the creative artist must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself—and in nature, to which he is devoted.
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Painting: the sphinx by Helene Knoop

from max wanger blog: jesse +whitney family

Be like a bear in the forest of yourself.
Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath.
Every hair has life
and standing, as you do, swaying
from one foot to the other
all the forest stands with you.
Each minute sound, one after another,
is distinct in your ear. Here
in the blur of mixed sensations, you can
feel the crisp outline of being, particulate.
Great as you are, huge as you are and
growling like the deepest drum,
the continual vibration that makes music
what it is,
not some light stone skipped on the surface of things,
you travel below
sounding the depths where only the dauntless go.
Be like the bear and
do not forget
how you rounded your
massive shape over the just ripened
berry which burst
in your mouth that moment
how you rolled in
the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling
with your sensate skin,
how you shut
your eyes and swam far and farther
still, starlight
shaping itself to your body,
starship rocking the grand, slow waves
under the white trees, in the
snowy night.

found at fern and moss

the girls have a new game they play outside -
one lies down on the ground, face up, eyes closed,
dead grass knotted in her hair.
one sister comes to the rescue,
placing the dead sister in the little red wagon
and carting her to the gazebo, which is really the hospital.
The sister pulling the red wagon is really a doctor
who saves the other sister
with concoctions of dead leaves, berries, and dirt,
which they call medicine.

the father leaves the door open while he works,
listening as the sisters play.

meanwhile, the contractions become
more intense, and the mother

makes a batch of homemade granola
for the nest.

… only a few more weeks,
dearest friends.

illustration from the dead bird by margaret wise brown