currently reading...

"There is no safe investment...to love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart 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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell. I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less destructive than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. We shall draw nearer to [what we seek], not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them...throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken and... this is the way in which they should break, so be it. What I know about love and believe about love and giving one's heart began in this." 

- C.S. Lewis.

This article proved a very interesting read.

thursday.

I finally took a little trip to the Hummingbird Bakery. (So maybe it was another one a little after that). And maybe I also stood in awe at the stationery in Liberty's and at the homewares in Anthropologie and came home with a pair of red vintage boots. My sister taught me how to knit on the train, too, and ever since I've been trying to pick up stitches and keep them there. 

 All in all, Thursday of last week was quite a lovely day. And a jolly good distraction.

the sea, the sea.

"Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it is sent away."


This seems kind of apt, lately, what with my unrelenting visits to the seaside. I like it, there. I like its space and its predictability; that tide will always kiss that same patch of sand, again and again.


I stumbled across this piece of performance poetry a long, long time ago. But I still love it so. It is as much about this lady's performance as it is her words. And I know it isn't really about the sea, but that line? Oh, it floors me. Every single time. There is so much hope, there.

on summer.

This summer is different to the one before. And, I hope, to the one that will follow. 


It is preceded by a heartbreak, a graduation and a few farewells to very dear friends. And it somehow leaves me floundering.

Twenty-twelve has been soundless, almost. I have lost the words in which to navigate it, to rationalise or to understand. I almost, at once, lost a love of words. But somehow I finished that degree I, for so long, struggled with through love. And somehow I managed to land a little work and a new college course and a few, unlikely friends.

But right now, I want to challenge it, this feeling of sorrow and sadness: turn it into something useful, and brave.

If somebody would like to take me to Paris for the winter, I would most happily oblige.


(Image via).