Lightly Child, Lightly

Posted on by Live & Learn


Ms Green didn’t believe her mind
was a dark room full of poisons—
a room cluttered with rags
pills, torn tinsel, perfume
in lavender glass. She got stuck sometimes
inside her mind like a bit of lint
caught in a web meant for a fly…
But today Ms Green learned to reach inside
and touch her own mind, lightly—
her mind more like
a stalled record player playing
one song in deep-grooved vinyl—
today she learned to pick up the needle
and move it a little to the right—

~ Amanda Beth Peery, from “A Poem About Anxiety”

Notes:

  • Photograph by Paul Brumit with Sony Turntable
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

30 thoughts on “Lightly Child, Lightly”

  4. dark and deep – contrary to the French sky: (over) bright and hot and sunny and endless – but nothing light about it….

  5. “a dark room full of poisons—
    a room cluttered with rags”
    Yoiks! Well, that’s why I meditate…need the bathing of light to clear away all the idle, ultimately unimportant blah blah bleah. [this program keeps correcting my word, “bleah.”]

  6. Amanda Beth Peery, has an interesting intellect, in the way she weaves her words.., she illustrates how Ms. Green makes a movement, akin to applying graphite to a stiff chamber of a keyed padlock, loosening becoming free within…Ms Green in her movement, out of the stuck grove, lifted, then clicked, toward awaking….each journey starts with a step forward.

  7. Amanda Beth Perry is a Harvard educated, young woman. She has rec’d awards for her poetry and is currently working as an Assistant Editor at Princeton University Press. IMHO she has a bright future.

  8. I loved this. The pictures she painted is too grey, hate to be there!
    But yes, it’s as fine as a needle and it is in our hands.

      1. Remember your post about August being like the top of a ferris wheel? My needle is right there right now,  highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses on its turning! Waiting for September so my needle can touch the Vinyl.

         https://davidkanigan.com/2015/08/04/the-first-week-of-august/

          1. “Late August —
            This is the plum season, the nights
            blue and distended, the moon
            hazed, this is the season of peaches

            with their lush lobed bulbs
            that glow in the dusk, apples
            that drop and rot
            sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands

            No more the shrill voices
            that cried Need Need
            from the cold pond, bladed
            and urgent as new grass

            Now it is the crickets
            that say Ripe Ripe
            slurred in the darkness, while the plums

            dripping on the lawn outside
            our window, burst
            with a sound like thick syrup
            muffled and slow

            The air is still
            warm, flesh moves over
            flesh, there is no

            hurry”

            — Margaret Atwood, Late August

          2. “Bored ducks fly awkwardly from spot to spot for no apparent reason. Only swifts and swallows still refuse to yield, they circle through the warm air at great speed, as if wishing to demonstrate to lazier creatures that life goes on just the same. Grain stands, patiently waiting for combines in fields just outside of town, summer’s great quiet commences. The quiet of heavy August days, when nature, like a plump Turkish lady in the sultan’s harem, lies on a sofa (an ottoman) and sighs, remembering her youth. Yellow fields, ripe. Sometimes a violent storm approaches, the wind lifts the sand from country paths and hurls it against the gardens’ stone walls. The boredom of summer. Of satiety.”
            ~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration, source; dk-thrive

  9. Sawsan, thank you for reminding us of some of the fantastic poetry DK has shared. Makes me realize how much I love these visceral passages…they’re like cold lemonade on a hot summer day…so satisfying!

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