T.G.I.F.: It’s Been A Long Week

~ Live & Learn

Source: Great Spotted Woodpecker by Head Like An Orange

37 thoughts on “T.G.I.F.: It’s Been A Long Week”

      2. that actually is a question I ask every single time when a pair of green woodpeckers are ‘at it’ in our garden…. Do they never get a headache? Nature is full of wonders.

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    1. So makes me wonder!

      “REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME you were ever on a Ferris wheel? Remember when you got to the very top and just sat there, the entire world at your feet? You could see everything. You felt like you could reach up and grab the sky. Your entire body tingled with this intersection of joy and indestructibility and fearlessness and that good anxious recklessness. So f*&king excited to be alive at that moment. You could do anything. Now imagine feeling that every day for a week, or a month, or a few months. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without a break. No “down.” No rest. So that everything you do feels like THE BIGGEST MOST AMAZING THING YOU HAVE EVER DONE IN YOUR LIFE! The first week or so, it’s great. You write and memorize dozens of new poems. You reach out to old friends you’ve lost touch with. You make new friends on the subway platform and on the third floor of Barnes & Noble and in line at Jamba Juice. You spend hours on the steps of Union Square Park watching the skateboarders and NYU students, imagining what their lives must be like. And these are all beautiful things because everything is beautiful. Everything is beautiful. Until it’s not.

      ~ Bassey Ikpi, “I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying: Essays” (Harper Perennial, August 20, 2019) 

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      1. That Bassey Ikpi citation…. 1st I thought NO WAY when the Ferries wheel was ment. I don’t do Ferries wheels, I DO photograph them and get dizzy when I work the photographs later…. But then I can easily relate to the rest of that quote. – But Dave, pls spare me buying more books, already HH is threatening to make a huge bonfire in the garden because we cannot take my 2000 books to a rental abroad and I’m in the hurtful process of putting hundreds of them aside because I KNOW I will not be able to read them again but you go and find English reading folks in France who would give a good home to my treasured books – but you just go ahead and list, day after day, more books I REALLY want to read…. That’s so unfair 😉

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  7. There are days, weeks, months where we feel like all we do is bang away to no avail…and then one day, we stop, take a look and mavel at all we managed to accomplish. (At least, I hope that’s how it will work 😉 )

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  8. Thanks for the morning chuckle!

    I’m not laughing at the woodpeckers motions, just the symmetry with my human condition sometimes! 🙂 Like yesterday trying to get an art piece to work! 🙂 I didn’t spy any woodpeckers on my walk (I think they’ve all flown south) but I did relate to the frustration which is what prompted me to get out of the house and into the wilds (or as wild as a city park can get!)
    🙂

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  11. Funny, but I feel delight in his intensity–he’s found a good source. A gorgeous maybe hybrid woodpecker found the tree I can see from my desk last week: with a huge vermillion plume of pilated crown but a golden color trunk like the sapsuckers (I think), also going at those larvae with gusto. [Wish I had been able to photograph.]

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