"Marigolds in my mouth"

This essay by poet Kazim Ali published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin is a gorgeous piece of work worth experiencing.

A quote:

I believe the "self"  is a risky conjecture... a weird coalition of celestial and spiritual matter, a wobbly and wild thing that quivers through life ... the way a compass needle quivers as it searches for the "real" magnetic north, which a scientist will explain to you is a floating and not fixed point.  

You are half yourself and the other part is just a set of notions -- some of them brilliant, some of them ridiculous, but in any case you will have to think hard in order to sort yourself out and sometimes it will take a stranger in the middle of another city to explain something to you.

And another:

As a human body, I have the privilege to be like dirt listening.