#birth

The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me. ↗

— Janet Fitch

#happiness #hope #sentimentality #wishes #wishing

We're all born an empty page. ↗

— Lauren DeStefano

#life #page #story #life

Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest - the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways - and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in - to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again. (pg. 27, "A Native Hill") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#darkness #humility #land #nature #rebirth

We repeatedly tell patients we are not in a hurry; there are no trains to catch and we don't care when the baby comes, only how! A doctor who is in a hurry does not belong in the field of obstetrics. As my chief pointed out, 'An obstetrician should have a big rear end and the good sense to sit calmly thereupon and let nature take its course. ↗

— Robert A. Bradley

#children #hurry #patience #time #nature

I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth. ↗

— Ovid

#youth

Hope drowned in shadows emerges fiercely splendid–– boldly angelic. ↗

— Aberjhani

#angels #courage #faith #haiku #haikus

Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven’s mouth. ↗

— Aberjhani

#dignity #faith #haiku #heaven #human-mortality

Tucker: "But she gave me the perfect gift." Clara: "What?" Tucker: "You. ↗

— Cynthia Hand

#crush #gift #sweet #gifts

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#sexual-personae #the-birth-of-the-western-eye #art

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved. ↗

— Mark Twain

#birth #funeral #grieve #involved #person