Aurora Raine Quotes

I will be everywhere you look but nowhere to be found and that will be my revenge.

there's rainbow behind the rain

You stop, and you turn back into stars. Mum says everyone’s made of stars. Is that true?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, and liked Anna even more than before. ‘All matter is forged by nuclear fusion reactions in the hearts of stars. They take hydrogen atoms, which are the littlest bits of the stuff the world is made of, and they bolt them together into bigger and bigger atoms – helium, oxygen, carbon, everything. All the atoms that make you. You’re star dust.’ She looked pleased with that. ‘And then when my atoms have finished being me, they go off back to the stars?’ ‘Some of them will be rain, some will be earth, some will float away and light up when the solar wind comes, and that makes the aurora. And like you say, some of them will find their way back into a star.

I understand why people prefer to be inside on a wet night, but I want to follow the year’s cycle out here on the shore, feel the rain and wind as well as turning my face to the sun at midnight and standing shivering under the aurora.

From a Berkeley Notebook' ~Denis Johnson One changes so much from moment to moment that when one hugs oneself against the chill air at the inception of spring, at night, knees drawn to chin, he finds himself in the arms of a total stranger, the arms of one he might move away from on the dark playground. Also, it breaks the heart that the sign revolving like a flame above the gas station remembers the price of gas, but forgets entirely this face it has been looking at all day. And so the heart is exhausted that even the face of the dismal facts we wait for the loves of the past to come walking from the fire, the tree, the stone, tangible and unchanged and repentant but what can you do. Half the time I think about my wife and child, the other half I think how to become a citizen with an apartment, and sex too is quite on my mind, though it seems the women have no time for you here, for which in my larger, more mature moments I can’t blame them. These are the absolute Pastures I am led to: I am in Berkeley, California, trapped inside my body, I am the secret my body is going to keep forever, as if its secret were merely silence. It lies between two mistakes of the earth, the San Andreas and Hayward faults, and at night from the hill above the stadium where I sleep, I can see the yellow aurora of Telegraph Avenue uplifted by the holocaust. My sleeping bag has little cowboys lassoing bulls embroidered all over its pastel inner lining, the pines are tall and straight, converging in a sort of roof above me, it’s nice, oh loves, oh loves, why aren’t you here? Morgan, my pyjamas are so lonesome without the orangutans—I write and write, and transcend nothing, escape nothing, nothing is truly born from me, yet magically it’s better than nothing—I know you must be quite changed by now, but you are just the same, too, like those stars that keep shining for a long time after they go out—but it’s just a light they touch us with this evening amid the fine rain like mist, among the pines.

FALL, SIERRA NEVADA This morning the hermit thrush was absent at breakfast, His place was taken by a family of chickadees; At noon a flock of humming birds passed south, Whirling in the wind up over the saddle between Ritter and Banner, following the migration lane Of the Sierra crest southward to Guatemala. All day cloud shadows have moved over the face of the mountain, The shadow of a golden eagle weaving between them Over the face of the glacier. At sunset the half-moon rides on the bent back of the Scorpion, The Great Bear kneels on the mountain. Ten degrees below the moon Venus sets in the haze arising from the Great Valley. Jupiter, in opposition to the sun, rises in the alpenglow Between the burnt peaks. The ventriloquial belling Of an owl mingles with the bells of the waterfall. Now there is distant thunder on the east wind. The east face of the mountain above me Is lit with far off lightnings and the sky Above the pass blazes momentarily like an aurora. It is storming in the White Mountains, On the arid fourteen-thousand-foot peaks; Rain is falling on the narrow gray ranges And dark sedge meadows and white salt flats of Nevada. Just before moonset a small dense cumulus cloud, Gleaming like a grape cluster of metal, Moves over the Sierra crest and grows down the westward slope. Frost, the color and quality of the cloud, Lies over all the marsh below my campsite. The wiry clumps of dwarfed whitebark pines Are smoky and indistinct in the moonlight, Only their shadows are really visible. The lake is immobile and holds the stars And the peaks deep in itself without a quiver. In the shallows the geometrical tendrils of ice Spread their wonderful mathematics in silence. All night the eyes of deer shine for an instant As they cross the radius of my firelight. In the morning the trail will look like a sheep driveway, All the tracks will point down to the lower canyon. “Thus,” says Tyndall, “the concerns of this little place Are changed and fashioned by the obliquity of the earth’s axis, The chain of dependence which runs through creation, And links the roll of a planet alike with the interests Of marmots and of men.

We moved to Eugene, Oregon, a small college town in the Pacific Northwest. The city sits near the source of the Willamette River, which stretches 150 miles north, from the Calapooya Mountains outside of town to its mouth on the Columbia. Carving its way between mountains, the Cascade Range to the east and the Oregon Coast Range to the west, the river defines a fertile valley where tens of thousands of years ago a series of ice age floods surged southwest from Lake Missoula, traveling over eastern Washington and bringing with their floodwaters rich soil and volcanic rock that now shore up the layers of its earth, alluvial plains fit for a vast variety of agriculture. The town itself is coated in green, hugging the banks of the river and spreading out up into the rugged hills and pine forests of central Oregon. The seasons are mild, drizzly, and gray for most of the year but give way to a lush, unspoiled summer. It rains incessantly and yet I never knew an Oregonian to carry an umbrella. Eugenians are proud of the regional bounty and were passionate about incorporating local, seasonal, and organic ingredients well before it was back in vogue. Anglers are kept busy in fresh waters, fishing for wild chinook salmon in the spring and steelhead in the summer, and sweet Dungeness crab is abundant in the estuaries year-round. Local farmers gather every Saturday downtown to sell homegrown organic produce and honey, foraged mushrooms, and wild berries. The general demographic is of hippies who protest Whole Foods in favor of local co-ops, wear Birkenstocks, weave hair wraps to sell at outdoor markets, and make their own nut butter. They are men with birth names like Herb and River and women called Forest and Aurora.

The only light came from the windows of those houses she passed that had open curtains, revealing little tableaux of family life: the young couple prostrate on a sofa in front of the television, their small child playing on the floor; the solitary old lady reading the paper; the table set for tea, while an unwatched television cast an aurora borealis of moving shadows in the corner.

Emotions rise and fall, the day is on trial, as if it was the holy grail of tomorrow, we win, we lose, we fall, we rise, and we dust ourselves down and carry on, life is like the weather it’s all made up for different seasons, and we don’t need any reasons as we move through the ages, in search of the sages, our discipline fractured, our focus blurred, our life on high alert, our honesty sincere, our souls resting in the shadows of our hearts, love always calling our names, through the rain, snow, sunshine, and the blizzards, In the north aurora borealis changing to green blue and cherry colors always in motion, always moving, and changing, in the south it is another matter, they call it aurora australis the southern lights, it is just aurora dancing floating up to the night sky, a message from mankind as it touches the stars, just one of so many wonders of the world, as the south gentle breeze travels over land and sea, one time or another we have taken the time to live in that moment, where we for a second realize all the miracles of nature, and we realize just how small we are in the universe, and we are all looking for a place called home, and it’s never easy when you find yourself as the travel, like the seasons that come and go, where the air moves freely and the rivers flow to that place called ocean, and with it comes thunder and lightning, as well as the cool breeze and the hurricane, this is our life, each day living through this beautiful mystery we call life, and I say ok there is so much more to learn, I am just a student in life looking for wisdom, like all other students of this nature, I took what agreed with me, and discarded the rest, I am not interested in being the best, I am just searching for the truth, please don’t see me as superior or inferior, I am just a soul who is asking questions, and looking for answers, and so my life continues in the storm of life, confused and enlightened just like you or any other, confused and enlightened just like you or any other

It’s not like my reputation matters anymore,” I said breezily. Stellan cocked his head to one side, studying me. He looked at me as if he looked right through me. Cain did too, but it was different with both of them. Cain studied me as if he could see through to my soul because it was the mirror image of his. Aurora, chasing the same darkness he did. Stellan looked at me as if he saw right through all my jaded edges to the girl I’d been–as if she were still alive at the core. Delilah, kissing him in the rain. “It matters to me,” Stellan said. He leaned in and kissed my forehead, and something about that felt more intimate–and angered me more–than Cain’s public display.

When I think of disabled literature and writing, I can think of a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not. I think of Audre Lorde—Black Lesbian poet warrior mother, legally blind, living and dying with cancer, whose work shines with the knowledge she gained from living with bodily difference and fighting the medical industrial complex. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Latinx maestra who started her period at age three and lived with bodily and reprogenital differences, living and dying with diabetes. Some of my work as a disability justice writer has been to look at the legacies and work of those foundational second-wave queer and trans feminist writers and creators of color—Audre Lorde and June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, Chrystos and Sapphire, to name a few—and to witness the disability all up in their work, even if they did not use that word because of any number of factors including the whiteness of the disability rights movement of the time. June's last decade of writing was all about her cancer. Gloria's writing had everything to do with her diabetes and neurodivergence and life-long bodily differences. Marsha and Sylvia were both neurodivergent Trans Black and Latinx activists and creators whose writing, performance, and art was at the center of their lives and activism. Chrystos and Sapphire's Indigenous and Black feminist incest survivor stories and poetry write from spaces of surviving extreme trauma, chronic pain from stripping and cleaning houses, CPTSD, grief, and psychiatrization. "I also think of the deep legacy of disabled writers (some dead, some still living but having done this for a while) who intentionally, politically identified as disabled. Laura Hershey. Leroy Moore. Qwo-Li Driskill. Aurora Levins Morales. Billie Rain. Dani Montgomery. Nomy Lamm. Cheryl Marie Wade. Emi Koyama. Pat Parker. Tatiana de la tierra. Raymond Luczak. Anne Finger. Leslie Feinberg, who died of Lyme disease. Peggy Munson. Beth Brant. Vickie Sears. Writers who are small press, micro-press, self-published, indie press, out of print. Writers I know and cherish, whose names I call when I talk about disabled writing. We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.