Lifeline

«To catch her of guard was the best way to throw her a lifeline that would pull her back to him and away from the dark places that sometimes lured her.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 12

«We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.» 

                                                                                                        T.S.Eliot 

Photos by Raquel R.

Unsaid

«Ultimately, throughout the course of their relationship, they both became specialists in each other’s non-verbal language, which they carefully learned to interpret, to the point of consider it to be much more assertive and reliable, in conveying a message, than, actually, words.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 12

«You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.» 

                                                                                           Tracy Chevalier 

       
                                                HEAD OVER HEELS from Timothy Reckart on Vimeo.

Quest

«So, every time he felt on the verge of being swept away by anxiety and his thoughts were dangerously becoming an incoherent mush, he would get on his car and drive without a specific destination.» 

                                                  By Raquel R. in Short Story number 12

«I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.» 

                                                                                              Jack Kerouac 

       
                                    a story for tomorrow. from gnarly bay on Vimeo.

No words

«She was sure that if she looked directly at him she would see two deeply carved wrinkles on his forehead, right between the eyebrows, shaping an odd frown, which was one of the most reliable indicators of the state of his mood.» 

                                                  By Raquel R. in Short Story number 12

«I think communication starts when words are not present at all … I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.» 

                                                                                       Marina Abramovic  

                                              Image by Raquel Rosário

Divinely aware

«Comfortably seated on the passenger’s seat, and although feeling a bit weary from the long drive, she still managed to maintain her senses on alert mode to absorb all the changes, like a curious and enthusiastic spectator.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 12 

 «The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.» 

                                                                                                   Henry Miller 

   Image by Raquel R.

Infinite beauty

«Through the slightly smudged car windows, the sifting peculiarities of the landscape, flashed before her attentive eyes, like the picture frames of an old motion picture. As the car rapidly progressed on the road, those changes became gradually more visible and easily recognizable.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 12

«Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.» 

                                                                                                 John Ruskin 

                                                 Image by Raquel R.

Harmony

«Looking around him, he spotted the glorious full moon silhouette, peeking among the tree’s branches. The sight of that unique, yet familiar vision was like bumping into an old friend in a foreign city. Its discrete glow was just enough to allow him a satisfactory perception of the surroundings. Not that he needed for he was pretty sure where he was going.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11 

 «It would be better for me … that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.» 

                                                                                                        Socrates  

Sense of wonder

«Like a sudden rush of energy in a lifeless being, that contagious and familiar sound, immediately re-established the connection with the sometimes forgotten and often neglected part of him that still preserved that childlike ability, to believe in what is considered impossible, in the light of the rational standards. 

                                                  By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11

«Don’t walk too far away from the child within you, and never abandon the sense of wonder that magnifies the smallest of things into mountains of joy — for one day, when you lose sight of happiness, that child within can guide you back to the things that once nourished your heart.» 

                                                                                                       Dodinsky 

       
                          Oliver Jeffers Author Film 2013 from Oliver Jeffers on Vimeo.

Extraordinary thing

«He felt that his senses gradually grew sharper making him sensible to all manifestations of life that were simultaneously happening around him, even the tiniest and imperceptible ones.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11 

«How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.» 

                                                                                          Jostein Gaarder 

Silence

«The profound silence of the nocturnal hours has always been one of the factors that impressed him the most in those lone night incursions, but in order to fully benefit from that experience, he needed to empty his head from all the gibberish talk that had been overpowering his thoughts and allow this peaceful state, resulting from the absence of noise, to impregnate his mind, like a sponge gladly welcomes the liquid element which will transform its barren matter into a fertile receptacle of life.» 

                                                  By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11

«A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.» 

                                                                             Christopher Isherwood 

Photo Raquel R.

Mystery

«Every time he gazed at the night sky, with its countless celestial bodies, illuminating the profuse and deep darkness, and submitted it, to the limited scrutiny capacity of the human eye, he automatically condemned his terrestrial nature to navigate his thoughts between two compelling possibilities: whether to feel crushed under the acknowledgment of the unimaginable dimension of the universe’s infinity, or to surrender to the irresistible attraction of being sucked in to the vastness of its mysteries. It was roaming between those two possibilities that he always found a starting point from which to derive his thoughts.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11 

                                        “And I, infinitesima­l being, 

drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.”

Pablo Neruda 

Night sky

«As always, in those occasions, he followed the standard procedure that had proved to be the most effective in appeasing those sudden peaks of lucidity, and after carefully selecting a secluded area, he engaged in the apparent prosaic action of  looking up to the night sky.» 

                                                  By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11

«I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.» 

                                                                                                Brian Greene 

       
                          Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds from Western Australia from Colin Legg on Vimeo.

Safe Haven

«On those occasions, when the amount of unanswered questions, dangerously defied his ability to make sense of the direction his life was taking, every atom of his being compelled him to seek guidance beneath the night sky, where he could benefit from the reassuring cover of the darkness and consciously reduce the probability of being caught out of guard, bearing his vulnerability.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11

«By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.» 

                                                                                 Henry David Thoreau 

       
                                                My Strange Grandfather from Dina Velikovskaya on Vimeo.

Imperceptible speech

«The product of that imperceptible speech can be found everywhere, whether in the form a slightest chill in the spine or in a stubborn certainty that despite the faint odds, never fades away.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11

«And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.»

                                                                                                                W.B.Yeats 



      
          Aurora Substorm - Real time motion from kwon, o chul on Vimeo. via The Kid Should See This

Connect

«Life, itself, in its unstoppable pace, manages to efficiently disconnect every being of its ancestral roots. But, when one listens carefully we might discover, that the universe always finds its way to summon and question us.» 

                                                  By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11

«Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.»

                                                                                                        Milan Kundera 



        
                                                           Borrowed Light from Olivia Huynh on Vimeo.

Solitude and Society

«This was no news to him. Every now and then, he feels deep in his bones, an urge to re-establish the vital connection and natural sync, of the flow of his life and thoughts, with the universe’s. » 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11

«Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night?»

                                                                                                                                            Virginia Woolf 



        
                                                  ANGELFISH - Short Film from Michael Tyburski on Vimeo.

Wind

«The late night breeze came in, unexpectedly, through the open window, revolving the hot and dense air. The tinkling sound of the wind-chime propagated its melody through every room in the house and that sudden stir on the quiet atmosphere propelled his energy levels to the point of felling a hint of restlessness taking over him.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11 

«The wind must have heard your voice once. It echoes and sings like you.»

                                                                                     Henry Dumas

                                                                          

     

WIND from robert loebel on Vimeo.

«Pathless woods and lonely shores»

«She opened her eyes to the immensity in front of her and felt small before it, yet as whole as she had ever been.»

                                                           By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10  

«There is pleasure in the pathless woods, 

There is rapture on the lonely shore, 

There is society where none intrudes,

By the deep sea and the music in its roar

I love not man the less, but Nature more.»

Lord Byron 

(via swiss-miss)

Breathing

«It was time to leave. She closed her eyes and let herself be rocked by the sounds of the gentle lapping ocean waves. Her breathing and heartbeat became one with that sound and magically everything seemed to make sense again.» 

                                                  By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10

«It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty, the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.» 

                                                                            Sir David Attenborough 

        
                       William Trubridge - Freediver from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo. (via This is colossal)

Time and tides

«Time passed by quickly. The tide was slowly rising again and the sun was setting. The sounds and smells were now more intense than ever. Behind her, the ocean mist descended upon that place transforming the coastal vegetation into a distant blur. Soon the darkness would take over the beach.» 

                                                 By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10

«At the beach, life is different. Time doesn’t move hour to hour but mood to moment. We live by the currents, plan by the tides, and follow the sun.»

                                                                                                                 Unknown 



         
                                         The City Exposed: Earthscapes from San Francisco Chronicle on Vimeo.