Absence...

If your absence doesn't affect them, your presence never mattered. 

 

 

Time To Say Goodbye

The Means to attain Happy Life Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. 1516–47 MARTIAL, the things that do attain     The happy life be these, I find:—   The richesse left, not got with pain;     The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;     The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;          5   No charge of rule, nor governance;   Without disease, the healthful life;     The household of continuance;     The mean diet, no delicate fare;     True wisdom join'd with simpleness;   10 The night dischargèd of all care,     Where wine the wit may not oppress.     The faithful wife, without debate;     Such sleeps as may beguile the night:   Contented with thine own estate   15   Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

What She Did...

The Space Between The Words

"Now you have gone into that space
Beyond language

You have gone into the pauses in our conversation
The time beyond time and time within time

You are in those moments when we sit in the audience
Waiting for the curtain to rise

And the end when the curtain has closed
And the actors have taken their bows

You are within the pauses of the bird’s song
When we strain to hear the next note

In the water between the fish
In the traveler’s silence within a foreign language

You are in the air that fills the sky
In the moments after the sunset

You are between night and day
Spirit next to soul

You are in the space between the words
The moment before the artist picks up her brush"

Vicky Lettmann
Oct. 1, 2013

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." 

- Oscar Wilde

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Shakespeare Sonnet 116