A Joseph Cornell Kind of Day

At odd times I find myself missing the Joseph Cornell study room I used to wander around in at the museum's print storage area. It was dim in there, chalk full of drawers holding bits of feathers, bones, scraps of paper, really a giant nest of foundlings. I was reading a random blog and came across this box:


and this achingly beautiful portrait of Cornell by Duane Michals:



PS: What is your favorite Cornell piece?

The wonders of the suit

There was this hilarious moment in my house this week when we were preparing our roommate Mike for an upcoming interview. Mike as a New York communist fella doesn't wear suits all too often so we were trying to help him out. Carl, being the same size of Mike would wear a suit, and Mike would wear the other option then they would change it up and Melissa and I judged which worked best. Lengthy conversations about collar size, ties, colors, vests, etc ensued and I must say I gained a greater appreciation for men's wear. Usually I don't trust suits, the smell of corporatism and sterile hallways, for me usually just give me a man straight out of the mountains. But these suits, wow, they speak of wonders, not of corporations and hierarchy but of the male form. Perhaps its the fact that my Mom as a fashion designer and seamstress and I grew up parading through her sewing room in patterns and fabrics that the sight of something really well made still brings me joy.

So here is a brief tribute to Men and their fabulous garments as brought to us by the Sartorialist (and J Crew)

a castle in the sky

i've spent an enormous amount of time this summer forgetting and remembering and trying to remember and reliving and forgetting all over again what it means to be a child. it's a funny thing, to move back to the same neighborhood you grew up in after nearly two decades of estrangement, only to find startlingly poignant pockets of familiarity here and there.

two of the students i've been tutoring are much less students and much more little kids, aged 8 and 6, forced to study english while july leaks slowly towards august. in the journal entries i assign them to write i find that i am remembering, more than through anything else, exactly what it was to be 7-years-old and living a stifling summer in seoul. and how it was that the playground could squeal its appeal to me with such delight, or the way the river could look so eternally magical with its boats in a queue like christmas lights. in my land of reverie i was a golden princess trapped by a wicked spell, or an adventuring scientist looking for a medicinal cure in the local backyard jungle, or a girl with a lovely necklace, falling from a castle in the sky...



thanks to miyazaki for his unfailing artistry and his continuing ability to perfectly illustrate all of the grandest imaginations and excitements of being seven again.
(and, of course, the opening credits of castle in the sky.)

The Function of Art/1

(this is one of my favorite eduardo galeano pieces)

Diego had never seen the sea. His father, Santiago Kovadloff, took him to discover it.
They went south.
The ocean lay beyond high sand dunes, waiting.
When the child and his father finally reached the dunes after much walking, the ocean exploded before their eyes.
And so immense was the sea and its sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it.
And when he finally managed to speak, trembling, stuttering, he asked his father:
"Help me to see!"

Pilgrimage

Outside the small town of Vladslo, Belgium, is a World War I German military cemetery. I visited this cemetery several months ago on a Sunday afternoon on my way from Ieper to Brugges. In the middle of Flanders, an area that suffered horrific losses between 1914 and 1918, I made a detour because I wanted to see The Parents, a pair of statues that German artist Kathe Kollwitz sculpted specifically for this cemetery, where the bodies of hundreds of German soldiers--including that of her son Peter--lay buried, their graves marked only by simple plaques bearing lists of names and dates.


It took Kollwitz about eighteen years to sculpt something she felt was appropriate for such a space, this humble cemetery in the middle of enemy territory. What she finally decided upon was a pair of statues, two parents, grieving over their dead sons.

I believe this is the most poignant memorial to the tragedy of war I have ever seen. And, in a melancholy way, it inspires me.

welkom!!!

to dear amanda , a true transpacificist if i ever saw one. we are so excited to see the treasures she finds for us!

damian ortega

this guy, like, defies everything i ever thought about installation art:

Controller of the Universe

2007

for more, click here

Music in the Wilderness

Have any of you seen the film "Out of Africa"? I must say it's a pure gem. One of my favorite quotes is when Karen(Meryl Streep) is describing Denys (Robert Redford) - "He even took the gramophone on safari. Three rifles, supplies for a month, and Mozart.' And of course while they are safari they place a grammophone near some wild baboons and play it. "Think of it: never a man-made sound... and then Mozart!"

Well, while perusing through BBC News today I found this article : "Hitting the high notes on Snowdon"

"Forget concert halls and theatres, a trio of cellists have scaled new heights to perform their music.

The three self-styled "extreme cellists" threw their heavy instruments over their back to scale Snowdon and then played together at the top.

It was the latest mountain in their challenge to play at the top of the highest peaks in the UK and Ireland.

Jeremy Dawson, Clare Wallace and James Rees are raising money for Mountain Rescue and a spinal injuries charity.

The trio - who are all amateur musicians - said they were inspired by the sport of extreme ironing, where adventurous people iron in remote and risky locations, such as on top of mountains and tall buildings.

They have previously played on top of every Anglican cathedral in England.

Mr Dawson, 32, from Sheffield, who by day is a university lecturer in statistics, said the climb to the top of Snowdon took just over three hours.

"It was a long slog but we were really lucky with the views - it was beautiful at the top," he said.

"Our cellos weigh about two stone (12.7 kg) each and we carry them on our backs like big ruck-sacs. It's hard work, especially going up the steep bits.

"But we've been in training, doing fitness work and taking our cellos up hills."

He said a few people joined them to walk to the top to listen to the music, but most walkers on the mountain were taken by surprise to hear live music being played 3,560ft (1,085m) up on Snowdon's summit.

"There were several dozen people on Snowdon listening to us - many of them were caught by surprise, which is nice," said Mr Dawson, who has been playing "extreme" music with school teachers Ms Wallace, 48, from Sheffield and Mr Rees, 28, from Ely, Cambridgeshire, since 2003.

The trio have so far raised over £3,000 from their mountain music challenge, which will be donated to the spinal cord injury charity, Aspire and mountain rescue organisations around the UK and Ireland."

reason 234,098,271 i love z.h.

So many feelings fit between two heartbeats

so many objects can be held in our two hands

Don't be surprised we can't describe the world

and just address things tenderly by name.

-Zbigniew Herbert, from "Never of You"

love courier in chicago

i found this link on apartmenttherapy.com and fell in love. it's a group of artists that courier love notes all over the city. the notes get put in these pretty glass bottles:

i strongly believe this service should be provided worldwide. for more information click here.

the bench project, mexico city

when i think "community" i don't typically think of a bench. but it makes so much sense. sitting with someone: perhaps the simplest form of community that becomes, in so many ways, another form of communion.

the bench project's exhibition begins with a lovely poem by eduardo lagagne (forgive my shoddy translation):

Here the desire, the illusion,
here the dreams.
Here the search,
the confession,
the intimate silence.

Here the indecision,
here the tremors, fears, questions,
the lover’s response, here.
Here hands are given,
a suggestive kiss.

So far the city
limits the noise.
Here, then, is peace,
a kiss,
a hug.

Here us,
nobody else,
us.

...and then the benches--they are gorgeous, celebratory, odd, and lovely...

"Ya no hay lugar" (There's no place anymore) by Leonora Carrington.

as july breathes into august...

"blue in green" by miles davis. probably one of my favorite songs of all time. it makes me want fire escapes and flickering street lamps, clothes humming in the dryer, bowls of hulled strawberries that i devour on my old back porch.

Jose Gonzalez - Hand on Your Heart

Well it's one thing to fall in love, but another to make it last

neruda: always near and dear

Clenched Soul

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.

Painting by William Rock with calligraphy by Huang Xiang. They have a whole poet/artist series that is awesome: The Century Mountain Project.

because sometimes you just need otters

(this is so widely circulated i'm sure you've all seen it. but it helps with getting through the final 10 minutes of work. it helps a whole lot.)

cuteness defeating global evil

Today my boss Aung Din had me proofread a speech he will give to the UN this week on prisoners of conscience. A lot of it was about his time as a political prisoner in Burma.

"I was arrested by the military intelligence, which is known in Burma as MI, on a passenger bus, while I was moving from a hiding place to another. A group of strong men forcibly removed me from the bus, blindfolded me, and handcuffed me at my back and threw me into a waiting truck. For two hours, I was on the floor of the truck, lying and facing the dirty floor, and these men put their boots on my body. For them, I was defeated. I heard their voice, reporting to their boss, using a walky-talky, that their mission was accomplished. I realized that a gate of hell was open.
"

He then goes on to talk about his torture, solitary confinement, confinement in total darkness, and more. It was pretty overwhelming. He is a stoic uncommunicative Burmese man who rarely speaks and has many serious health problems. I had never heard the details from him about his time in prison. I know many Burmese who have been imprisoned and many of my heroes still are.

And so I took a cue from my boss and did what he does to help with the pain - I looked up on google images of puppies. Seriously, his desktop on his computer is that of puppies and kittens. He has problems relating to people after so much he's been through, but animals, animals, he loves.

So yes, puppies, bless you.

Hotian

"In the Chinese language, when we say, qian, "ten" that's the day before yesterday. The word, qian, means "in front of, or before." So yesterday lies in front of us. When you say hotian, that is the day after tomorrow; ho means behind us. So the future is behind us. To the Chinese mind, the future is behind s, the past is in front of us. We are backing up, blind, into the future. Which is true. Now, to the Western mind, the future is all before, so you leave the past behind. I think that's backward, because what you're lookin at is in front of your eyes, is actually, literally, the past. All of this... the tape... everything ... is going into the past, as we speak. Three billion cells a minute, as we speak, at that rate. So all of this is going away, and we're just falling into the dark"

-li young lee

Julia Mavimbela

So many years ago my mom was getting worried about me and one day gave me a book on talks from Womens Conference, and of course the one I read is from an amazing South African sister, Julia Mavimbela, who has been a fuel in healing her people.

I ran across this quote again and thought I would share it:

"I give thanks to God that he has made me a woman. I give thank to my Creator that he has made me black; that he has fashioned me as I am, with hands heart, head to serve my people. It can, it should be a glorious thing to be a woman. It is important for women to be aware of their common lot. It is important for women to stand together and rise together to meet our common enemies - illiteracy, poverty, crime, disease, and stupid unjust laws that have made women feel so helpless as to be hopeless."

and how borges is so wise

"A writer lives. The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule. No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry. I suppose a painter feels that colors and shapes are besieging hi. Or a musician feels that the strange world of sounds--the strangest world of art--is always seeking him out, that there are melodies and dissonances looking for him. For the task of an artist, blindness is not a total misfortune. It may be an instrument. Fray Luis de Leon dedicated one of his most beautiful odes to Francisco Salinas, a blind musician."

From "Blindess"

everyday should be zbigniew herbert day

there are the small cadences in a poem that overwhelm me with joy. and there's poems like herbert's "Five Men" which reflects on the execution of five men. it just works so imperfectly and beautifully. though it is comprised of three rather stunning sections, the third is the one i want to read to you tonight:

so why have I been writing
unimportant poems on flowers

what did the five talk of
the night before the execution

of prophetic dreams
of an escapade in a brothel
of automobile parts
of a sea voyage
of how when he had spades
he ought not to have opened
of how vodka is best
after wine you get a headache
of girls
of fruit
of life

thus one can use in poetry
names of Greek shepherds
one can attempt to catch the color of morning sky
write of love and also
once again
in dead earnest
offer to the betrayed world
a rose

a craving for simplicity

edward hopper, late in his life, said this beautiful thing: "All I want to do is paint sunlight on the side of a house." And then he painted this:

and i revel in it. i've been thinking a lot lately about what is my sunlight on the side of a house. he spent his entire life documenting the melancholic, or sometimes bucolic (yes, those lovely seascapes of his) and at the end of the day he was satisfied with the infinite beauty of light playing off of an unremarkable siding. there is such poetry in that view--i love it.

look up lily

In addition to "snow," she also uses the "lake of the woods" as a medium.

I spent some of the weekend on an inlet of the Chesepeake Bay, and I wondered what kind of wonders it might voice given a canvas.

loving

su blackwell

most amazing news clip

i found this clip a few weeks ago and have been thinking about it ever since. one day i will write a poem about this crown and the mistress.

Nepal's Monarch Departs
Deposed King quits palace forever; but an elderly mistress stays

KATMANDU, NEPAL | Nepal's deposed king gave up his crown of peacock feathers, yak hair, and jewels Wednesday and left his palace forever [...] but a remnant stayed behind: the 94-year-old mistress of the deposed monarch's grandfather, who died more than a half-century ago.

Few Nepalis knew of the mysterious elderly woman's existence until authorities announced Wednesday that she would be allowed to continue living in the palace. The reason: the youngest mistress of King Tribhuwan, who ruled the Himilayan kingdom from 1911 until his death in 1955, has no house to move to or relatives to take her in.

BINAJ GURUBACHARYA (AP)

and this, this is that amazing crown:



i want whole books and paintings and murals made about this story!

how a raspberry can become the world

patricia and i went to the boston holocaust memorial this weekend and this was inscribed on one of the glass towers:

"Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night in a leaf.

Imagine a world in which your entire world is one raspberry and you give it to your friend."

-Gerda Weissman Klein
Deported from Germany as a teenager. Later married the Army officer who led the troops to rescue her.

there are a million things contained in this single observation and i wish i had the words to describe just one of them.

Read this to yourself all day...

PHENOMENAL WOMAN
by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I'm not cute or built to suit a model's fashion size
But when I start to tell them
They think I'm telling lies.
I say
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips
The stride of my steps
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please
And to a man
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees
Then they swarm around me
A hive of honey bees.
I say
It's the fire in my eyes
And the flash of my teeth
The swing of my waist
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say
It's in the arch of my back
The sun of my smile
The ride of my breasts
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say
It's in the click of my heels
The bend of my hair
The palm of my hand
The need for my care.
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman
That's me.

Sei la vita, il risveglio

a poem by Cesare Pavese and two photos by Toni Frissell

Toni Frissell (b. 1907) was not Cesare Pavese's (b. 1908) lover, but I like to imagine what might have been had they exchanged love poems and love photographs.

Mark the Music

A spattering of quotes from Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art

"Generally speaking, colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul."

"There is no 'must' in art, because art is free.'

"More particularly speaking, white, although often considered as no colour (a theory largely due to the Impressionists, who saw no white in nature), is a symbol of a world from which all colour as a definite attribute has disappeared. This world is too far above us for its harmony to touch our souls. A great silence, like an impenetrable wall, shrouds its life from our understanding. White, therefore, has this harmony of silence, which works upon negatively. It is not a dead silence, but one pregnant with possibilites. White has the appeal of the nothingness that is before birth, of the world in the ice age."

"In the hierarchy of colours green is the 'bourgeoisie' - self-satisfied, immovable, narrow. It is the colour of summer, the period when nature is resting from the storms of winter and the productive energy of spring."

riff 2 landscape

a dear friend shared another poem that fits right into these landscape thoughts. you can find her thoughts here. and i am just going to blatantly copy the yeats poem she shares:

The Cold Heaven

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting Heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! When the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

Did I find a patch of bright white hair on my head? yes. Am I a little obsessed with the idea? yes.
Do I pretend that I am appalled, but am secretly a little proud? yes. Thank you Grandma Christensen, I will most likely have a head of bright white hair by the time I'm 30.

Riff on Thelma's landscape post...

Oh this poem--gorgeous and big and sad and lovely.

AMERICAN SUBLIME by Elizabeth Alexander

(At the same time, American paintings wherein
the biodynamic landscape explodes in flames,

ice, violent sunshine that seems to burn the canvas,
apolcalyptic nature that roils and terrifies.

The Beautiful: small scale, gentle luminosity.
Sublime: territorial, vast, craggy, un-

domesticated, borderless, immense, unknown,
awful, monumental, trascendent, transcending.

Go West and West young man, to blinding snowstorms. Leave
shark-infested waters, shipwrecks without slaves.

Miraculous black holes of color large enough
to blot out the sun, obliterate the unending moans,

to exalt, to take the place of lamentation.)

trapeze!

my life, as of late, has felt like this: trapezey. it is a brilliant feeling. see more of jayme mcgowan's lovely pieces at her etsy store.

black and white loveliness

remember the black & white party at the MOA a few years back? it reminded me of how much i love b&w--the starkness, the simplicity, and yet the intense depth that the two contrasting shades compose. here are two Raymond Saa sumi ink paintings and charcoal drawings (found on the delightful my love for you blog).

i love this piecing together of things here

mechanism and humanism

even in the most synthetic world of things, there is a reach and cry for life:



(by kim young-jung)

the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse

I went to the Corcoran gallery the other day and first went to the exhibit "American Evolution" and my friend Logan and I debated over the worthiness of landscapes and impressionism as well as commented on the beautiful flow of the paint on that woman's neck. Art was something beautiful and for this exhibit slightly tinged with social commentary.

by the way the Corcoran gallery has the nicest public restrooms I've ever seen

But the next exhibit was one called "Access to Life" - a photographic exploration of people in 8 different countries and how having/ or not having anti-retroviral drugs has affected them. Logan and I didn't really talk in this exhibit. I didn't know what to say, didn't know what to write as I saw a man's progression into death photographically captured and even a woman's progression back to life couldn't propel me enough to speak.

I remember a conversation that I had with a friend recently about whether art and creation was everything in life. The moments where our desire to create diminishes and when it is augmented. I think we realized that art can destroy as fast as it can create and can remove us from life as quick as it can link us.

When Carol Emerson came and spoke freshmen year about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy she said "the moment of creation is selfish." I don't think she mean that it creation or expressionism is wicked, but I think the thought did go into my thoughts of creation and life work. Is creation and expression the end goal? Is this just another false dichotomy?

Well I just will pause this thought with a quote from the classic anthem Dead Poets Society "We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

picture 1: Albert Bierstadt : The Last Buffalo
Picture 2: Vietnam, 2007 © Steve McCurry/Magnum Photos

O Magnum Mysterium

"O great mystery," goes this chant, arranged by Morten Lauridsen, possibly the most divine song of all time. I haven't heard this song since high school, but visiting the National Cathedral, I heard it again. Lovely.

Why I Love Love (some thoughts of I've had lately)

Friendship and love does not have to be complicated or tricky. It can be simple, earnest, and deep. It should be, I think. Life is hard enough as it is. Just to know that you are able to love someone is a grand gesture. I don’t know what all this talk is about grand gestures—love is grand just by being so wildly incompatible with the chaotic world. I am beginning to see a shift in my expectations of others and for myself. It is really enough to let someone know you care about them individually. It is enough to notice the small things, to do the small things. I have trouble keeping in touch and I have a tendency to burn bridges. I am trying to stop because those impulses are driven by fear—not being good enough, not being anything enough. But what I’m learning is that all anyone really wants is to be noticed, to know someone cares about them, to know that someone knows their name, to know that someone can and will put their arms around them. In a time of such uncertainty, I love that we can do this for each other.

One more reason to love a 15th century feminist:

Ginevra de' Benci

She read insatiably and wrote poems (few of which have survived), including one that holds a single line that moves me with its ferocious vulnerability: "I ask your forgiveness, I am a mountain tiger."

One of my life goals is to write a poem or essay gracious enough to use those words.

(Incidentally, this Leonardo DaVinci portrait of Ginevra hangs right here in the National Gallery--coming face to face was magnificient!)

man and his existence

from Korea's National Museum of Contemporary Art:

Man is one of the subjects that will never disappear as long as humankind exists in this world. The diversity and depth of man gives the term multiple faces. The exhibition puts the existential being of an individual in focus and intends to think about the significance of existence. Here, an individual refers to the subject that recognizes its real being as it leads its daily life.
The exhibition is divided into three subdivisions: 'One's everday existence in the public sphere' where are shown isolated individuals of today's society; 'Gazing at one's own self' where one discovers his or her own true self by denying him/herself; and 'Corporality', where artists' movements are incorporated into painting at the realization that the human body conveys human existence itself.
In the exhibition, one looks at how the underlying sense of existence is projected to works of art.






1. Iron Plate + Wires + Lead. Yoon, Jeong-sup
2. Work 85. Yun, Myung-soon
3. The Day For House-Raising. Ryu, Kyung-chai
4. At The City's Subway. Park, Hyun-ki

modern times ii. by hong seung-hyeon

if we attempted to connect all the people of the world together, would it feel something like this?

An addition to Ashmae's thoughts on love and Lia's lovely video

Excerpts from "Leap" by Brian Doyle

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes. [...]

Stuart DeHann saw one woman's dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaing hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the windows holding hands. [...]

Their hands reaching and joining is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here. [...]

Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but the did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near LIberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.

WELCOME!!!

So much joy and love for our newest transpacificist: MARIO!!!!

something for this moment

a dear friend sent me this video a few days ago, and i feel like it perfectly illustrates this summer for me. something about being in such a large city makes me feel sort of despairingly connected and isolated, all in the same moment: i pass a million people every day, and i feel so ready to reach out and grab their hands, learn their names, draw a dot-to-dot between us - or to pass by without a glance, clutching my purse instinctively in a rhythm to the push and pull of the subway cars. what is it about humanity that at once connects and isolates, gathers in and then separates?

A relationship, a marriage, love, is not an easy thing. To love from far away, perhaps even more difficult. I do feel though that part of our reason for existence, perhaps the reason for existence is to learn that love, not that love comes upon us and we skip through it's fields of unending wildflowers on perfect spring days, but more that we get down, and kneel in the mud and dig with our fingers and pull out the weeds, side by side, or maybe not even side by side, maybe we can only see one another's silhouettes in the distance, but we will be there, working under the orange sun, maybe not even understanding why. But we will always stand up at some point, and walk back home together through something beautiful. and something hard.