On hiding

"For we must have hiding, places to lick our wounds, if only for a little while. I am troubled by this, and moved. We must have hiding, places where we can drop all pretenses not to just be ourselves but to dissolve into something else. We must have hiding, because we are not private people after all; we are in our own dreams the pull of the same ocean, waves that break and crest together. We can't avoid our human obligations. We must have hiding, because it is only here, away from the processes of society and people-forming that the divine kernel of ourselves is lit and stays glowing among the hypocrisies of the day; we hide because we need to, to let the fragile wick catch fire, burn innermost, keep going, keep going."

--from "Dreams I Had of Hiding" by Robert Vivian

On heritage

"Strange how we'd wanted to get as far away from that life as possible, we'd wanted to escape any chance of daily reminders, and yet all three of us were using art to express and re-create and revisit the past.

Heritage.

The farm would always be ours, even if we were no longer there. We could claim it in writing, in music.

--from "The Orchard" by Theresa Weir

Kansas

Decked out

Erin and I worked 12 hour days at the Hub City Bookshop on Friday and Saturday to sell you books, to talk about books, to decorate around books and with books. It was fun and exhausting. This is the result.