( oil painting by me / me )

Do Not Be Ashamed.

      "Schrödinger's Senator"

all these tracks ixnay
after crystal distance
      carillon
   ode protocol
loco torpedo · pastoral

all these words waxing
like the wan old moonface
      empty front
   i still turn at

To the Unseeable Animal.

"Thinking of that time Wendell Berry was invited to give a keynote lecture at a conference on hunger. He looked around at the audience & remarked (I'm paraphrasing here): 'I see a lot of well-fed people.' " —@the-big-quiet.bsky.social

"There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places and desecrated places."

—Wendell Berry via @emmaeli.bsky.social

"It is an emergency that calls for patience, and to be patient in an emergency is a hard requirement." --Wendell Berry

"An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars." --Wendell Berry

"The job now is to get back to that other perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all competently wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having." --Wendell Berry in: The Poet's Work ed Reginald Gibbons (1979)

"The reason we need to have our certainties shaken is so that we may see the possibility of better orders than we have."
—Wendell Berry

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun a real journey.” —Wendell Berry via @bookbent.bsky.social

"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it."

- Wendell Berry via @alinastefanescu

"Ask the questions that have no answers. / Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant, / that you will not live to harvest. / Say that the leaves are harvested / when they have rotted into the mold. / Call that profit. Prophesy such returns."

—Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” via @themeanderingmiltonist

"It was no thought or word that called culture into being, but a tool or a weapon. After the stone axe we needed song and story to remember innocence, to record effect—and so to describe the limits, to say what can be done without damage.” —Wendell Berry via @athornebrooke

"Yvor had reduced the worthwhile poets in English to five, one of whom was always Winters and three of whom were former pupils of his, while the fourth would be changed weekly and might be a poet no one had ever heard of.."