QotD: Words To Live By

What's your motto?

i thought long and hard about my motto...there's a japanese proverb about cherry blossoms that i love...(i love the fleeting beauty of cherry blossoms...the idea that its like this bright burst of an entrance  for spring...so girly I know.) Anyway- one thing that my bizarro schedule these past two weeks has afforded me is lots of opportunity to sit and think (and knit) and I've thought a lot about the past year, and how much things around me have changed, how much I have changed (for the better, get your minds out of the Lifetime TV for women gutter).

Working with one of my favorite reporters at work, I noticed the following on her desk...and it was something I really took to, that I've thought of it many times since. I have it written in my molskine, and I have it in my gmail to refer to whenever I want. It makes me happy, in the same way that I felt when I first read the last lines of Whitman's "Song of Myself"...I think the cadence is similar, and I feel like there's a sort of proximity that you feel with the writer- like you're being told a wonderful secret, or you're party to one of those french new wave moments that will forever exist freeze framed in your head.

Okay maybe I'm being a little too melodramatic...here goes....

"The moon did not become the sun.

It just fell on the desert

in great sheets, reams

of silver handmade by you.

The night is your cottage industry now,

the day is your brisk emporium,

The world is full of paper.

Write to me."

-Agha Shahid Ali

(and for those of you who are curious, here's whitman's last lines)

I depart as air- I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;

If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;

Missing me one place, search anotherm

I stop somewhere, waiting for you.