Sunday Morning

~ Live & Learn

Sunday was another fine clear day. No wind to speak of, and the fall colors in the valley sparkling in the sunlight. Small white-breasted birds hopped from one branch to the next, deftly pecking the red berries. I sat on the terrace, soaking it all in. Nature grants its beauty to us all, drawing no line between rich and poor. Like time—no, scratch that, time could be a different story. Money may help us buy a little extra of that.”

~ Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore: A Novel. (October 9, 2018)

Photo: Paula W with chaffinch

18 thoughts on “Sunday Morning”

    1. Yes. So true. Reminds me of:

      “In that stillness, I lifted my head and looked around.

      What I saw was time passing, each minute collecting behind me before I had squeezed from it any life.  It went so fast, is what I’m saying,  that I myself sat still in the center of it.  Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock.  The only difference is,  I was not so durable as stones.  Very quickly I would be smoothed away.  It was happening already.”

      ~ Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (Odyssey Editions, Aug 15, 2010)

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          1. Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. It’s hard to swim against the current. Onrushing, inevitable, carried like a leaf, Fleur fooled herself in thinking she could choose her direction. But time is an element no human has mastered … For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? … We are time’s containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

            ~ Louise Erdrich, Four Souls

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          2. and another:

            “So many things in the world have happened before. But it’s like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it’s a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. We held each other’s arms, tight and manly, when we got to the border. A windbreak swallowed him up. I didn’t want my lights to show, so I cruised for miles and miles in the soft clear moonlight, slow, feeling the comfortable dark behind me and before.

            I didn’t turn the headlights on until I hit the highways. Near dawn, I came to the bridge over the boundary river. I was getting pretty close to home now, so I stopped the car in the middle of the bridge, got out to stretch, and for some reason I remembered how the old ones used to offer tobacco to the water. I looked down over the rail.

            It’s a dark, thick, twisting river. The bed is deep and narrow. I thought of June. The water played in whorls beneath me or flexed over sunken cars. How weakly I remembered her. It it made any sense at all, she was part of the great loneliness being carried up the driving current. I tell you, there was good in what she did for me, I know now. The son that she acknowledged suffered more than Lipsha Morrissey did. The thought of June grabbed my heart do, but I was lucky she turned me over to Grandma Kashpaw.

            I still had Grandma’s hankie in my pocket. The sun flared. I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home.”

            ~ Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (Odyssey Editions, Aug 15, 2010)

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    2. Dale, I’m with you on this – like the added comments better than…. doesn’t happen often but is to me a marvellous sign of our interaction on David’s blog – which we sometimes tend to take over (just a bit – and just a few of us…. 😉 I’m grinning right now).

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