quote

351//365 by Rebecca Tillett

Could I say it's been 16 years and I hardly think of you anymore? Could I say I've forgotten so many of the sad details of your life that helped to paint my own in such vividly dark colors? Could I say I've forgiven you for robbing me of a life without a father, the opportunity to open my heart to you and spill 16 years of pain, now doubled, the sudden way you changed and redefined my life, or the way you didn't say goodbye?

Read More

312//365 by Rebecca Tillett

""I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die."

Read More

Throwing Your Entire Body by Rebecca Tillett

"Never be the grown woman without direction. Never be the person with no goals or aspirations. Never float aimlessly through life. If you don’t have the answers, pretend to have the answers. And if you don’t know what inspires you, pretend everything inspires you. But that’s difficult, isn’t it? If you’ve never been inspired, how would you know how to feign it? It’s like attempting, in vain, to speak a language you’ve never learned. It’s like making love with your clothes on or swimming in the ocean with a life-jacket. Until you’ve ever really experienced passion and knowing the feeling of loving something so much more than yourself, throwing your entire body into it without discretion is an impossible task."

Read More

Post-Civilization by Rebecca Tillett

“It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves.”—Jerry Spinelli

Read More

Living Lives That Matter by Rebecca Tillett

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away."

Read More

Before You Know It Something’s Over by Rebecca Tillett

"My father died on November 14th, 1995, when I was 14. Every day since the day he died I am one day farther away from him than I was before. This is the truest thing about me. It is the most important and worst thing to ever happen to me. It is me. My father died when I was 14. I will tell people this forever. It is the truest thing about me. I was 14 when he died. My father. I was 14. I am what I have lost." —Marie Lyn Bernard

Read More

Nothing Good Gets Away by Rebecca Tillett

It's startling and even profoundly jarring how suddenly feelings of such fear and crushing defeat can sneak up on me; how small and alone I can feel in this painfully short and so quickly passing lifetime.

Sometimes life is nothing but a blur. Sometimes I think I'm predisposed to my father's eventual hopeless and fundamentally relenting inclination.

(Or worse even, my mother's living fear of being simply alone with herself.)

Read More

Break Your Own Heart by Rebecca Tillett

"You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart." —Cheryl Strayed

Read More

For Now, Relentlessly Onward by Rebecca Tillett

I'm on a journey to find my purpose. I haven't yet figured out if it's something I carelessly lost along the way somewhere a few miles back, a few years back, a few spins back or if it's something I've never truly had a firm grasp on - purpose has always felt like a moth or a butterfly fluttering by me occasionally. If I'm lucky, every now and then I'll cage it between my hands, marveling at it's elusive beauty but it always escapes, fluttering away to be caged by others inevitably.

Read More

Before I Lose You by Rebecca Tillett

"I would like to make love to you, and again, my tired head on your breasts, and again, my strong arms and shoulders lifting your hips up and rocking them, again, both hands turning you and pulling you and finally crushing down into you, again, my sweat and weight upon you. And again: for sex may get boring, but making love does not get boring, but it does get more and more intimate." —Waylon Lewis

Read More

Craven Art by Rebecca Tillett

On Saturday I shot a wonderful Denver-based artist who hired me to take some portraits of her in her studio. Angela Craven is a beautiful, funny, and interesting abstract painter in her free time and a software designer m-f to pay the bills. And I am exceedingly jealous of her studio space. A big open sunroom that's gorgeous, bright and open. I've never been hired for a shoot of this kind so I was really excited to do it and I'm thrilled with the results.

Read More