29 Quotes by Sondra Charbadze

I sit for a long stretch of time, focusing on that pain like an original point, like the early ache of displacement that explodes into the shape of our lives, like the fires which rage around us for the entirety of our days, threatening to swallow us blank. But as I wrap my breath around that original point, as I sink deeper and deeper into the loss, I feel a shiver like presence. I squint and imagine the pit splintering open. A spot of red at the center: Is this joy?

Maybe pain is not the original point. Maybe it is freedom i.e. connection i.e. unbroken love i.e. the hum that rivers its way through the broken speech of being, i.e. joy. At birth each child is dunked into this red sea. We emerge from the salt, soaked and rejoicing.

We have all eaten of the fruit of life, not knowing we have swallowed its death-seeds. The seeds sprout into weeds tall as trees, choking. Smothered or not by distraction or belief, this we share: death as a shared feast, suffering as our communal drink.

This is how the earth and sky meet: a stretching of time, a suspension of space. Obliteration, maybe. Is this how we meet ourselves?

Love is a gathering of minutiae. Stones, dirt particles, the waxing/waning light, goat’s milk, chamomile,and honey. I am learning the excruciating art of attention, my small gift of sight to the world. The wider the world, the smaller I seem. This smallness is relieving. Concerns, like the self, are pebbles to be tossed into the sea.

This is what it means to become wild again: it’s to peel back the niceties of society. I have had too many of these: the niceties. I have become one myself: a person like a platitude, pleasing and flat.

Writing is secondary speech and speech is secondary being. This Gaudí knew: that creation must be born of theophany (communion with the silence beneath beings and identities).

This is love, I think, to hold a name carefully between the teeth, to hold without swallowing.

A thousand men could not keep me warm. My soulmate is the totality of the teeming earth.