We Talked About It Late Last Night...

It's Thanksgiving and I'm skipping classes and here's what Istanbul's melancholy (it's essence, according to Orhan Pamuk, it's nobel prize winning author) had friends share in the kitchen last night...

And when the wheat you've known
forever sours in the wrong wind and you smell it
dying in those acres where you played, please know
old towns we loved in matter, lovers matter, playmates, toys,
and we take from our lives those days when everything moved,
tree, cloud, water, sun, blue betwen two clouds, and moon,
days taht danced, vibrating days, chance poem. -- Victor Hugo, Letter to Kathy from Wisdom


You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you. -- John O'Donohue, from A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted


Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. -- W.B. Yeats, I Have Spread My Dreams