Light Filters In Poems Quotes

It's okay if some things are always out of reach. If you could carry all the stars in the palm of your hand, they wouldn't be half as breathtaking

How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you.

You can't root yourself In the ground, hoping the world Will grow around you. You were made to do More than hide in the shadows Of another's leaves

Be grateful that Time will heal the wounds but Leave the scars. How else will you Remember all that You've survived?

Don't ask for respect; Demand it. Don't look for opportunity; Grab it. Don't add to the world; Change it.

I am not pretty. I have never been pure or soft or sweet. I am beautiful. Dirt still on my shoulder as I rise from the ground. Scars forming and healing like galaxies over my skin. I am beautiful in the way I fought back when I was buried. I turned the dirt and mud into soil, and grew.

I am still learning to let myself grow. I am still learning that it is not selfish to let myself become the person I am meant to be.

The wounds have healed and the scars are fading. My skin is pale and smooth. I've started to confide in my closest friends. They embrace me. Support me. Surround me. For the first time, it is scarier to think about going back than to think about moving forward.

This year, I fell in love with myself. I told myself thank you. I'm sorry. It's okay. Thank you for fighting to survive even when I don't want to. I'm sorry I blame you for things you can't control. It's okay that you're not perfect. I will love you anyway. Now, I look at my face in the mirror instead of my body. You are the most important person in my life.

you held my wrists, propped me up, and moved me on your stage; all my life has been a script and you wrote every page. you set a backdrop, painted smiles, hid what was within; come one, come all, and see her now: the doll in human skin!

if you think you are drowning, just remember: you float in water.

The problem was not asking him to complete me. The problem was believing I was incomplete to begin with.

I am done being delicate. As a girl, I was taught to be sweet, to be dainty, to fold into myself until I was nothing more than crumpled paper. This is my unfolding. I will use gunpowder to set my makeup and gasoline as my perfume. Next time you try to burn me at the stake, I will burn back. I will start a fire you cannot control.

This year, I fell in love with myself. I told myself thank you. I'm sorry. It's okay. Thank you for fighting to survive even when I don't want to. I'm sorry I blame you for things you can't control. It's okay that you're not perfect. I will love you anyway.

writing was not a stage or a museum exhibit— it was an echo chamber, a way to talk to someone, even if that someone was my own voice bouncing back at me.

He tells me, you are a complicated person to love. I know, I reply. I struggle with it every day.

I’ve spent so much time trying to become who I should be that I lost myself along the way.

And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes” says the man with a cart of empty bottles at the corner of church and lincoln while I stare into my phone and I say I know oh I know while trying to find the specific filter that will make the sun’s near-flawless descent look the way I might describe it in a poem and the man says the moment is already right in front of you and I say I know but everyone I love is not here and I mean here like on this street corner with me while I turn the sky a darker shade of red on my phone and I mean here like everyone I love who I can still touch and not pass my fingers through like the wind in a dream but I look up at the man and he is a kaleidoscope of shadows I mean his shadows have shadows and they are small and trailing behind him and I know then that everyone he loves is also not here and the man doesn’t ask but I still say hey man I’ve got nothing I’ve got nothing even though I have plenty to go home to and the sun is still hot even in its endless flirt with submission and the man’s palm has a small river inside I mean he has taken my hand now and here we are tethered and unmoving and the man says what color are you making the sky and I say what I might say in a poem I say all surrender ends in blood and he says what color are you making the sky and I say something bright enough to make people wish they were here and he squints towards the dancing shrapnel of dying light along a rooftop and he says I love things only as they are and I’m sure I did once too but I can’t prove it to anyone these days and he says the end isn’t always about what dies and I know I know or I knew once and now I write about beautiful things like I will never touch a beautiful thing again and the man looks me in the eyes and he points to the blue-orange vault over heaven’s gates and he says the face of everyone you miss is up there and I know I know I can’t see them but I know and he turns my face to the horizon and he says we don’t have much time left and I get that he means the time before the sun is finally through with its daily work or I think I get that but I still can’t stop trembling and I close my eyes and I am sobbing on the corner of church and lincoln and when I open my eyes the sun is plucking everyone who has chosen to love me from the clouds and carrying them into the light-drunk horizon and I am seeing this and I know I am seeing this the girl who kissed me as a boy in the dairy aisle of meijer while our parents shopped and the older boy on the basketball team who taught me how to make a good fist and swing it into the jaw of a bully and the friends who crawled to my porch in the summer of any year I have been alive they were all there I saw their faces and it was like I was given the eyes of a newborn again and once you know what it is to be lonely it is hard to unsee that which serves as a reminder that you were not always empty and I am gasping into the now-dark air and I pull my shirt up to wipe whatever tears are left and I see the man walking in the other direction and I chase him down and tap his arm and I say did you see it did you see it like I did and he turns and leans into the glow of a streetlamp and he is anchored by a single shadow now and he sneers and he says have we met and he scoffs and pushes his cart off into the night and I can hear the glass rattling even as I watch him become small and vanish and I look down at my phone and the sky on the screen is still blood red.

right now, I am a rough draft; I am here to be revisited and revised. hard as I try, I am not the girl poets speak of. I am not made up of ocean tides and my heart is not a crystal drum; it will always be a weapon more than anything. I am an incomplete masterpiece, full of crossed-out words and changes. no one ever calls the first draft beautiful, and I will never be the final piece.

Find yourself in a page. Look at where you are. Find your past in the pages before. Look at all that you have survived. Find your future in the pages after. Look at all that you have ahead.

The happiness will come slowly, the way light filters in through the window in the early morning hours. So slowly you don't even notice the night is ending, until you wake up and see the sunlight.

last night, I felt it. happiness. I didn't recognize the spark at first. I had forgotten what it was like. but then, there it was. a flash of light. a second of warmth. a glimmer of hope when all I had for years was darkness. and just the idea that this might not last forever is motivation enough to keep going.

Find yourself in a page. Look at where you are. Find your past in the pages before. Look at all that you have survived. Find your future in the pages after. Look at all that you have ahead. This is not the end of your book. You are right at the heart of it. Keep reading.

I'm sure you've been offered the world, you're deserving of each land. I bet you could sew up the valleys and mountains with just the touch of your hand. I'm sure you've been offered the world, but my pockets have all been worn through. So I'll write you an ocean, I'll write you a sky, and hope that's enough for you.

She is the sweet fragrance, The magic of the dusk, The cloud in the waterfall, The drops spilled as dew, Rays filtering in the morning.

last night I felt it. happiness. I didn’t recognize the spark at first. I had forgotten what it was like.

for all of our wounds will be healed with time.

So I’ll write you an ocean, I’ll write you a sky, and hope that’s enough for you.

How will my mental illness affect my romantic relationships? What will happen when I become emotionally vulnerable? Will they stay?

I had to send away for the beacuse they are not available in any store. They look the same as any sunglasses with a light tint and silvery frames, but instead of filtering out the harmful rays of the sun. they filter out the harmful sight of you --

There are times that I am doing so well, I stop taking my meds. And suddenly I feel like the light switch has flipped off. And suddenly I feel like I am not better because of my hard work. And suddenly I feel like a fraud. I try to remind myself that the brain is an organ, that this is a disease, that diabetics need insulin and no one thinks of that as cheating. I try to remind myself that this is not a boost, this is a treatment. So I swallow my pride along with my pills and let myself get better.

I know you want to drown yourself in the sadness. It’s comforting to let it surround you, heart pulsing, lungs aching as you feel it overwhelm every inch of your skin and diffuse into your cells. But I hope you know sadness is a revolving door. once you’re in it, letting the sadness take you around and around and around, it won’t stop on its own. You’ll just keep going around and around and around. That’s why you need to fight to stop it, fight to stop spinning, fight to get out. Get out of that infinite sadness.

No teacher of RE ever said to me: “Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.” What we receive through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch is all we know. We have tools that can enhance that information, we have theories for things that we suspect lie beyond that information, filtered through an apparatus limited once more to those senses. Those senses are limited; the light range we detect is within a narrow spectrum, between infrared light and ultraviolet light; other species see light that we can’t see. In the auditory realm, we hear but a fraction of the sound vibrations; we don’t hear high-pitched frequencies, like dog whistles, and we don’t hear low frequencies like whale song. The world is awash with colors unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests. Expressible only through symbol and story, as it can never be known by the innocent mind. The stories are formulas, poems, tools for reflection through which we may access the realm behind the thinking mind, the consciousness beyond knowing and known, the awareness that is not connected to the haphazard data of biography. The awareness that is not prickled and tugged by capricious emotion. The awareness that is aware that it is aware. In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me. Nature looking at nature.

conclusion: I am lovable.

I am still learning to let myself grow. I am still learning that it is not selfish to let myself become the person I am meant to be.

be grateful that time will heal the wounds but leave the scars. how else will you remember all that you've survived?

sometimes unlearning is so much more important than learning.

sometimes I think we will always come back to each other. not by chance, but by choice. there is no magnetic pull, no right time or right place. the stars are not aligned for us. so we reach our hands up to the night sky and rearrange the ourselves.

don't tell me my brokenness is beautiful this is not beautiful this nearly killed me

all is fair when love’s a war, and every day is a fight.

I’m trying, and maybe I’m not succeeding, but it’s a start.

If my significant other sees all the symptoms of my mental illness, then they will leave. If my significant other sees all the symptoms of my mental illness, then they will decide it is not worth it. They will decide I am not worth it.

The doctor rolls up my sleeves and asks if the marks are new. I tell her yes, but that it was after three months of being clean. The therapist pulls back my exosphere. It’s hard for me to let someone look at the storms. But I let her anyway. I’m trying, and maybe I’m not succeeding, but it’s a start.

The happiness will come slowly, the way light filters in through the window in the early morning hours. So slowly you don’t even notice the night is ending, until you wake up and see the sunlight.

You can’t root yourself in the ground, hoping the world will grow around you. You were made to do more than hide in the shadows of another’s leaves.

This year, I fell in love with myself. I told myself thank you. I’m sorry. It’s okay. Thank you for fighting to survive even when I don’t want to. I’m sorry I blame you for things you can’t control. Tt’s okay that you’re not perfect I will love you anyway. Now, I look at my face in the mirror instead of my body. “You are the most important person in my life.

What a relief it is to live a life I am excited to wake up to.

Last night I felt it. happiness. I didn’t recognize the spark at first. I had forgotten what it was like. but then, there it was. a flash of light. a second of warmth. a glimmer of hope when all I had for years was darkness. and just the idea that this might not last forever is motivation enough to keep going.

You don’t look like a complete thought. You are paused at a semicolon placed by a careless author. I’m waiting for the second half of the sentence when maybe there isn’t even one at all.

how to stop the thoughts how to stop the sadness how to be happy how to be happy how to be happy how to be happy

last night I felt it. happiness.