Between sleep and awake

Koki Tsujimoto, Dragon Rising to the Moon

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself by Barbara Crooker

James Jean

Braid III

— Novalis (aka Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), “Hymns to the Night” (original title: “Hymnen an die Nacht”). (Friedrich Schlegel in the Athenaeum, 1800)

𝙵𝚎𝚋𝚛𝚞𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝟷, 𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟸 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟺-𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟹

[ID: February 1. Nothing, merely tired. END ID]

Ama Codjoe, from "The Bluest Nude" [ID'd]

Devin Kelly, from "How to Drown"

“In a culture so besotted with personal ease, it is a profound act not to turn away. To commit. To speak up. To protest. To teach. To gather in community and action.

So much of this moment involves breathtaking misinformation, attachment to ideas, conflation of preservation and narrative - the insistence that one person's safety can only exist by siphoning another's freedom. For many allies, the antidote is to continue to relationally show up, look for openings, continue to humanize, continue to seek out messy, uncomfortable conversations.

And for those contemplating and questioning: remember that at any given moment you may choose to reevaluate an idea. You may choose the risk of curiosity. The power of private, quiet reckonings: the ones happening behind the scenes, the tender confrontations between you and yourself, between yourself and a long-held belief.

It is easy to focus on the sense of powerlessness, the inconceivable loss, the vetoes, the complicity. It might feel cognitively harder to recognize our collective power, to remember the impact of small actions: they dismantle powerful narratives, seed curiosity, mount political pressure.

There is no miraculous tide that is shifting: the tide is made up of millions of people around the world choosing to pour their hearts, time, resources, hearts, personal ease into not looking away.

Steadfastness says more about the relentlessness of oppression than some magical patience inherent to the oppressed.

There is nothing glorious about steadfastness: it is a task like any other. Nobody should be asked to do it. Steadfastness, endurance, resolve: these are choices in the service of our moral compass and value system, of how we want to spend our time on this earth.”

— Hala Alyan

weave your past into a quilt, of pain and pride and prodigy. lay it upon yourself as fall fails and cold creeps in – your shivering stops, your heart recalls, and with memory of sunlight, winter does not seem so long. 

Marbre de jeune fille, Musée de Rennes, France

— W.B. Yeats, from Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats; “The Shadowy Waters”

Larissa Szporluk, from Dark Sky Question; "Solar Wind"

Sunrise, Louise Glück

Guillermo Lorca García

Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Clive Bell written c. April 1908 featured in The Letters of Virginia Woolf