believe it.

[lostdetective]

“life will break you.
nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearnings.
you have to love.
you have to feel.
it is the reason you are here on earth.
you are here to risk your heart.
you are here to be swallowed up.
and when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt,
or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree
and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.
tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

- louise erdrich, the painted drum, p. 247

Comments

[chekhovs_kettle]

Oh, I saw this yesterday, and for a while just now I couldn't remember where. Amanda Palmer's blog. I just let my eye go over it, not in the mood to read it... but I read it now, and I'm glad I did. It's a really true poem. Thanks for posting it.

I like the phrases "living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with it's yearnings" and "apples falling around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness."

[lostdetective]

Yeah, I actually stole it from her blog. :) Struck a pretty hard chord with me. One of those rare perfect-poem-at-exactly-the-perfect-moment things.

It is the reason we are here on earth. Have to remember that. And that solitude is not the answer... although it sounds nice, sometimes, just to disappear from the radar and focus on nothing but reading books and writing songs and stories. To really take a good look inside yourself -- but many would argue that, really, you can't learn who you are without the mirrors of others.