"
We should have started from this: the sky.
A window without a sill, frame, or pane.
An opening and nothing more,
but open wide.
I need not wait for a clear night
nor crane my neck
to examine the sky.
I have the sky at my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.
The sky wraps me snugly
and lifts me from below.
Even the highest mountains
are no nearer the sky than the deepest valleys.
There is no more sky in one place
than another.
A cloud is crushed by sky as ruthlessly as a grave.
A mole is as enraptured
as a wing-fluttering owl.
A object falling into a precipice
falls from the sky into sky.
Granular, liquid, craggy,
fiery and volatile
expanses of sky, crumbs of sky,
puffs and snatches of sky.
The sky is omnipresent
even in darkness under the skin.
I eat sky, I excrete sky.
I am a trap inside a trap,
an inhabited inhabitant,
an embraced embrace,
a question in answer to a question.
To divide earth and sky
is not the correct way
to consider this whole.
It merely allows survival
under a more precise address,
quicker to be found
if I were to be looked up.
My call words
are delight and despair.
"
— The Sky Wislawa Szymborska
Ask me about the most beautiful place in the world. I will tell you.
Ok. So here is the dealio kids. I went to Venice. It was just an amazing amazing incredible, ridiculous, crazy, wild, spirited, fantastic, fjaiopteiaopfdjsakfdl kind of time. If I describe to you everything that happened, how all of the accademia had dinner with our teachers, Claudia and Gianni, and then celebrated with a post meal frollick/dance/headstand/lawbreaking/singing adventure through late night venice. How me and four other ladies met five strangers, all of us stopping through Venice deciding that it would be so wonderful to share the beautiful city together so we got lost in the city for the rest of the day. How we got to see glass blowing and meet a man who lives in a mountain of books. How we had to take a boat to another island in order to get to our movement class in a old stone building converted into a theater. How this whole city seems to put people into this spell, a kind of magical free spirited spell.
I could try and explain all of those things to you, attempting to help you understand how magical it all was. But words would fail me. As we have learned in our philosophy of art class, writing down this story would only give you an idea, an image of what Venice might be, and that image just wouldn’t suffice. You have to just go to Venice. You must. Bucket list and all. Just do it, because “you can eat an apple, but you can’t eat the idea of an apple.” You can read all about Venice, but you cannot read about it and acquire the full experience of being in Venice.
Next stop. SPRING BREAK. Nice. London. Cork. Dublin.
“Patience has a quality of honesty and it also has a quality of holding our seat. We don’t automatically react, even though inside we are reacting. WE let all the words go and are just there with the rawness of our experience.”
This world is ours. Do with it how we please.
1. Take this moment of touch with your partner as a at least one point in your life you will not experience lonliness.
2. It is your human right to feel the Earth.
3. “This is your time, this is your class. I have no bearing on your success. Do what you want.”
4. Don’t be polite. Mom’s not watching.
