Welcome to Litsy!

A golden sunbeam hit the book just as I finished these pages on the colour yellow, and it was beautiful.

The first couple pages of WHERE THINGS TOUCH convinced me I should hold off until I could let it totally consume me. I started it this morning, and while it‘s lovely I‘m sorry to say it hasn‘t CONSUMED me. Sadness.

This keeps happening to me. I think something‘s gonna blow me away, but I only regular-strength love it in the end. Which, yeah, is great, but I‘m eager to find a book that‘ll really knock me over.

Library haul! I‘m especially excited about the tagged book and the sheet music.

My head was full of phrases and sayings. What was that lovely one again? A path is made by walking on it.

A lovely collection of thoughts about beauty, in fragments that blur the line between essay and poetry, written by queer Canadian Bahar Orang when she was a medical student. #LGBTQ

Beauty is not indulgence, beauty is our right.

There‘s a hypothesis in medicine: reading, a word unconsidered & unqualified, will make you a more empathetic & humane doctor. Except I have known students & scholars who, despite all their literary cunning & writerly prowess, seem to know little about things like compassion. I have known voracious readers who, in reading, simply reinforce their own small-minded beliefs—readers who find, by reading, new logics & arguments for those beliefs.

Yes, flowers have long been of the realm of woman, whatever that might mean, but I like flowers not for their softness or beauty, but for the way they peer back at you—amused, unflinching, curious, but not too fussed with us. Though their peering might, after all, be the displaced centre of beauty.

I am taken instead by the strangeness of flowers, a strangeness familiar & unfamiliar. Flowers can be called queer, their style, their manner of swaying in the half-light, dressing & undressing, spread-eagle, leaning against each other, exhaling, falling apart, coming back together, dying then living.

Even lovers have tried to impress upon me the importance of reading Hegel or Heidegger, lovers who have declared my sheepish disinterest a symptom of a modern, shallow throng. In one case, I was advised to be permanently suspicious of beauty. How unnerving, then, all the times this same lover remarked that I was beautiful.

Beauty governs me. No, it‘s not an obsession. No, it‘s not just a project. Well, maybe it is. A project that is my life.

… perhaps all free things are not necessarily beauty, but I suspect that all things of beauty are necessarily free.

These are the queer love stories that interest me, encounters of beauty between sunlight and pillow—between summer and stillness.

For me, these paintings say solitude, a radical solitude, with all their frankness and their silence.

[regarding Etel Adnan‘s art; internet image]

Poppies are not meant to be potted, they can never be kept by florists, they are wildflowers that resist any other kind of life. What happens to beauty when it‘s removed from its own dirt? If you pick a poppy, it withers within the hour. How simple a practice, then, to let flower, let flower, smelling its own earth.

Highly
Recommended
Young Female Physician
We will be sharing ‘a stage‘ on December 3rd

https://www.cpd-umanitoba.com/events/poetry-and-a-medical-life-a-reading-and-con...