pretty little things from 04.27.25
finding stillness on a windy sunday
pretty little things is a series of moodboards and musings —
small collections of colors, textures, feelings, and half-formed thoughts.
pieces of my own voice, stitched together with poets who have said it better than i ever could.
a quiet place for slow stories and the things that don’t fit neatly anywhere else.
Today feels like the hush after a storm you can't remember —
everything washed in green light, trembling at the edges.
The air tastes metallic, like something about to break open.
The heart carries a small, necessary ache — the kind that means something inside you is growing roots in the dark.
And in the silence, Pablo Neruda leans in to murmur:
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Quiet," from Estravagario (1950)
And still, the horizon blurs into the sky. The eye blurs into the open air.
Everything’s stitched together with invisible threads, pulling slightly at the edges of you.
Merwin threads the feeling even quieter:
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W.S. Merwin, "Separation," from The Carrier of Ladders (1967)
Absence is not hollow today.
It is a fullness, a silent pressure against the skin.
Not loneliness, not fear — just space being made inside you.
Rilke, speaking across a century, reminds us:
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet," letter written 1904, first published 1929
And so we walk softer. The ground hums underfoot. A slow remembering stirs in the windy desert heat.
Sylvia Plath, fierce and luminous, leaves a handful of fire:
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song” (1965)
Even the smallest rituals—the folding of laundry, the walk by the lake where the water ripples under the restless wind—feel sacred today.
Not an escape. A devotion.
A way to tether yourself to the luminous ache of being alive.
The wind moves through it all —
soft, unseen hands turning the pages.
Even the stones seem to shift slightly in their sleep.
And as the sky folds into itself, Mary Oliver gathers it all close:
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts,
her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
Mary Oliver, "Sleeping in the Forest," from Twelve Moons (1978)
A Sunday stitched with dust and quiet rustling.
A day of soft rebellions, restless air, and the slow, bright pulse of becoming.
No feeling is final.
No silence is wasted.
You are still, and you are still becoming.
happy sunday, you pretty little things—x
