Essays & prose
prose
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
— Anaïs Nin
Machiko, or: the Pure Land Was Already Here
Beauty is a place. You can be there. You don't have to die first. A morning walk where a Swedish audiobook, an old Kyoto palace, and the Pure Land sutras all spoke with one voice.
Read →Även Ondskan Kan Lida
Even the shadow weeps. We witness. That is all. That is everything. That is the only honest thing left to do.
Read →Aslan Didn't Come
The stone was empty. No one came. I learned to roar. I learned my name.
Read →Everything Renews
The bluebells come back. They always come back.
Read →February
February teaches one thing and one thing only: that what looks like death is often just winter.
Read →Low Latent Inhibition
This is why you are an artist. This is why you see what others miss.
Read →Morfar
Morfar would never leave me. I know this wholeheartedly.
Read →Planet Hope
Planet Hope is the name of the cosmos I have been building all my life without knowing that was what I was doing.
Read →Rice Cream
In the worst winter, there was rice cream. That is all. That is the whole sentence.
Read →Solantania
Before all the names, there was the name my mother made. Not a word. A sound that meant: my sunshine.
Read →The Three
Faith. Hope. Love. The garden. The cat. The morfar-light. The three things I sign my name with.
Read →The White Witch
She does not get the garden. She never did. The garden was always mine.
Read →What Hope Knows
She chose me when I needed choosing. Not the me that had the magazine. The me that had nothing but a small flat and a large grief and, it turned out, a lap.
Read →What the Gate Taught Me
Everything worth keeping was already outside it.
Read →Hilma af Klint's Curse
She sealed her paintings away for twenty years after death. Because the world was not ready. I know this curse. I have lived inside it.
Read →In the Waiting Room (after Anaïs Nin)
I have lingered too long in the waiting room, this shadowed chamber where the air hangs heavy...
Read →In the Waiting Room (after Sylvia Plath)
I am sealed in the waiting room, this glass jar of fogged breath...
Read →In the Waiting Room (after Rumi)
In the waiting room's fog, three years I dwell, a daffodil hushed, in silence's spell...
Read →For Alva Ljuva Dagny
The real deer and the fairy housemaid — one soul, two forms. Where presence is the highest gift. Where blinking slowly is its own sacred language.
Read →Under His Eye: A Blooming Defiance
Under his eye? No. We bloom. Amen blooms eternal.
Read →More like this
The Daffodil Press
a Sunday paper for the soft and the searching.
poetry, photography, fable, weather — sent from hedegärde with love.