The Handmaid’s Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Year: 1985
“WE were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
As I attempt to write my way through my running blues, Pepper comforts me with a protective presence and a flicking tail.
Lately I’ve been stumbling across a whole bunch of these ruthlessly inspiring messages, like notes that life is passing me in the classroom marked ‘Getting through the Day 101’.
I wonder if life has a crush on me!
No rolling of eyes, please!
Be wise, be truthful, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes to a short period.
While we speak, envious time will have {already} fled.
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next (day)
“You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.”
Anais Nin
The Nomad in Spirit 