How can something bother you if you won’t let it?
—Terri Guillemets
letting go
Poetherapy
Writing poetry
is letting go —
once the words leave your pen
they’re out of your soul —
and the therapy has begun.
—Terri Guillemets
Chasing the past
Chasing the past, I stumbled into the future.
—Terri Guillemets
P.S. Thanks so much to Rebecca for letting me know that this quote was used in the television show Being Erica. In the episode “Plenty of Fish,”
Everyone, everywhere
Hate less, live longer.
—Terri Guillemets
Sylvia’s figs
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
—Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), The Bell Jar, 1963