For the story behind this picture of the day, click here.
"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."
~ Paul Dirac
A Picture and Quote a Day using one five megapixel digital camera, every book I've ever read or skimmed, every song I've ever heard, and one big world.
~ John Denver, "Leaving on a Jet Plane"
So I don't believe in "other lives" in this sense, but I thought this quote was a beautiful description of the chaotic swirl of human experience.
"There will be other lives.
There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands.
And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecision and revisions.
And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles.
And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk.
And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything.
Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human's life is a beautiful mess."
~ Gabrielle Zevin (Elsewhere)
The Blue Between
By Kristine O’Connell George
Everyone watches the clouds,
naming creatures they’ve seen.
I see the sky differently,
I see the blue between-
The blue woman tugging
her stubborn cloud across the sky.
The blue giraffe stretching
to nibble a cloud floating by.
A pod of dancing dolphins,
cloud oceans, cargo ships,
a boy twirling his cloud
around a thin blue fingertip.
In those smooth wide spaces,
I see a different scene.
I see those cloudless spaces,
I see the blue between.