It takes strength...

It's so easy to laugh 

It’s so easy to hate 

It takes strength to be gentle and kind

— The Smiths  | I Know It’s Over

In the 18th and 19th centuries, wealthy British and European lovers exchanged eye miniatures,

love tokens that captured the gaze of the recipients significant other. They were worn on the lapel as to be close to the heart.
Less than 1,000 are thought to exist, often both the owner of the piece and the subject within it are never identified.

startling...

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

— Emily Dickinson

Katrien De Blauwer|Couleur Pâle

spiral...

The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral.

You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.

— Barry H. Gillespie

Lisa Rodden

leavened heart….

I had hushed conversations with the moon

about a love that would leaven my heart.

And then you came,

latched onto my heart and burrowed deep to its seed.

A budding has sprouted out of my mouth

- a cluster of flowers dressed as your name.

— leavened heart - Tapiwa Mugabe
Guinevere van Seenus Photographed by Ben Hassett for Dior Magazine.

Never...

Never push a loyal person to the point where they no longer care.

Gelatin Silver Love | Kazumi Kurigami | 2009

finales...

What's left is a blur

of sky where the weather

rehearses its own finales.

— Linda Pastan
Yuli Sate

Seventh time….

He took her note out of his pocket and read it again for the seventh time that day.

As he did, he grew exactly the same smile as before.

“Thank you for making me hungry and I’m not talking only about food; you make me hungry in so many wonderful ways.”

— Jonathan Carroll
Typewriter Series #639 by Tyler Knott Gregson

Voices...

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body,

and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

— Virginia Woolf, 'Night and Day'

'valentino haute couture' photographed by max von gumppenberg & patrick bienert for vogue italia’s couture supplement march 2014.

potted roses….

I held lucid conversations

with a potted rose

Empathizing over falling petals and tears.

How they have similar silenced grace

Unlike fallen angels.

Aren’t we all searching for a love 

that should have been here by now?

I am now practicing intentional piety 

To find strength

To return to sacredness-the sanctity of my being.

— potted roses - Tapiwa Mugabe
Kristen McMenamy by Tim Walker for Vogue Italia October 2012

I wish...

I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness.

And yet I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them

— Frederic Chopin

Irving Penn