Words I Needed Last Week 6/26

You keep worrying you’re taking up too much space.

Words I saved, read, wrote down, and savored last week. From sipping bitter truth, letting yourself be big, to tenderness revealing problems and potential, to eating and drinking and tasting the day.

Photo taken by Nneka Julia on 35mm film. Puerto Escondido (2022).

Happy Monday, friends.
—Nneka

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“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”
—Denis Diderot

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“You keep worrying you’re taking up too much space.
I wish you’d let yourself
be the Milky Way.”
—Andrea Gibson

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“Developing tenderness towards yourself allows you to see both your problems and your potential accurately. You don’t feel that you have to ignore your problems or exaggerate your potential.”
—Chögyam Trungpa

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"We want our artists to remain as they were when we first loved them. But our artists want to move. Sometimes the battle becomes so violent that a perversion in the artist can occur: these days, Joni Mitchell thinks of herself more as a painter than a singer. She is so allergic to the expectations of her audience that she would rather be a perfectly nice painter than a singer touched by the sublime. That kind of anxiety about audience is often read as contempt, but Mitchell’s restlessness is only the natural side effect of her artmaking, as it is with Dylan, as it was with Joyce and Picasso. Joni Mitchell doesn’t want to live in my dream, stuck as it is in an eternal 1971…her life has its own time. There is simply not enough time in her life for her to be the Joni of my memory forever. The worst possible thing for an artist is to exist as a feature of somebody else’s epiphany.”

—Zadie Smith

*Edit your life and your art ruthlessly and frequently. Go to the edge, as Toni Morrison said, and make it your center. Remaining the same for an audience will only lead to resentment. As you continue to find and uncover new parts of yourself, the right people will find you.

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“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
—Wendell Berry

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"This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...You must play your part and sing a song, one of your best.”
—Herman Hesse

*Eat and drink and taste and smell the day. I love this.

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"For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgment. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't.”
—Jorge Luis Borges