An Old Woman Of The Roads, By Pádraic Colum
An Old Woman of the Roads, by Pádraic Colum
Oh, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all! The heaped up sods upon the fire, The pile of turf against the wall!
To have a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down! A dresser filled with shining delph, Speckled and white and blue and brown!
I could be busy all the day Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor, And fixing on their shelf again My white and blue and speckled store!
I could be quiet there at night Beside the fire and by myself, Sure of a bed and loth to leave The ticking clock and the shining delph!
Och! but I am weary of mist and dark, And roads where there’s never a house nor bush, And tired I am of bog and road, And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!
And I am praying to God on high, And I am praying Him night and day, For a little house - house of my own - Out of the wind’s and the rain’s way.
More Posts from Gretagarboreincarnate and Others
Athenais by John William Godward (1908)
'You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.'
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“I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else. And all that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.”
— Nikos Kazantzakis, tr. by Carl Wildman, from “Zorba the Greek,” wr. c. 1946
We notice unusually beautiful things because they jolt us out of a state of unawareness. The secret is that we are surrounded by beauty everyday. We just have to make a conscious effort to notice and appreciate it.
It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question.
Joan Didion, On Self-Respect, 1961.
Do everything with Love.
“I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.”
— Fernando Pessoa (via antigonies)
“Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow" - Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt & Emmylou Harris performing on The Dolly Parton Show (1976)
Ireland, Iran & Lebanon
Anaïs Nin, from the diary of Anais Nin, vol. VI: 1955-1966
