Sunday Morning

~ Live & Learn

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle…
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

~ Wendell Berry, from “I Go Among Trees and Sit Still” in Sabbaths

Notes:

Poem: Thank you The Hammock Papers. Photo: “Sit a While” by Erik Witsoe (Poznan, Poland, Park Solacki)

39 thoughts on “Sunday Morning”

  5. Dale will be on a more normal schedule that will enable better sleep schedule! Dale has such a great attitude about life I imagine that she doesn’t let anything get to her 🙂 but is grateful for all that visits her life…

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        1. Ah, yes. I get it.

          “If I have been given any gifts in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination. I’m in my eighties now, and if there’s one thing of which I am most proud, it’s that I have permitted no authority (neither civilian nor military, neither institutional nor societal) to relieve me – by means of force, coercion or ridicule – of that gift. From the beginning, imagination has been my wild card, my skeleton key, my servant, my master, my bat cave, my home entertainment center, my flotation device, my syrup of wahoo; and I plan to stick with it to the end, whenever and however that end might come, and whether or not there is another act to follow.”

          – Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (Ecco; May 27, 2014)

          ——-
          So come to the pond,
          or the river of your imagination,
          or the harbor of your longing,
          and put your lips to the world.

          And live
          your life.

          ― Mary Oliver, from “Mornings at Blackwater” in Red Bird (Beacon Press, 2008)

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          1. Wow wow wow…

            I’ll tell you a little story that’s been surfacing frequently in the past few months. Someone I dated when I was in school once decided to analyze the personalities and traits of a group of us before class started. He looked at me and said, “Sawsan, you’re a day dreamer.” I was so offended.
            I’m a scientist. I don’t dream.

            It’s been decades and if I see him again I just want to tell him he was right. So right. I’m all day dreamer. The one thing I thrive in. My thrive cloud. What my soul feeds on.

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    2. Ooooh Sawsan & Dave; I love the unfurling of this story…. Thanks for sharing – and the extra poems – makes me truly happy on this grey, Novembery December day which doesn’t know yet in which direction it wants to go!

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  8. I like what little I’ve read by Wendell Berry. I read a passage a few months ago by him -I’ll have to look for it and share…I love trees and I love photography…and the photo you share is reminiscent to me of the Grand Park I gratefully grew up adjacent too. Having the park as an extension of our visual gaze, such beauty within our daily environment, of so many memories, of soul binding formation of appreciation…that I weep as I write…I can’t imagine how empty my life would be if I wouldn’t of had that immersive foundation of beautiful nature just outside by door….I was very blessed to have grown up where I did…and now of course I live surrounded by natural beauty too…

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  13. Pingback: Sunday Morning | Teacher as Transformer

  14. Kiki, here is what you asked for some more great words from Wendell Berry:

    The Peace of Wild Things
    Wendell Berry

    When despair for the world grows in me
    and I wake in the night at the least sound
    in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
    I go and lie down where the wood drake
    rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
    I come into the peace of wild things
    who do not tax their lives with forethought
    of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
    And I feel above me the day-blind stars
    waiting with their light. For a time
    I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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    1. Christie, thank you so much. This is one awesome writer! So much to make my hairs standing up (they’re usually very curly… ;)) :

      – I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
      – I come into the presence of still water.
      – And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
      – For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

      The sheer beauty of these words pushes tears in my eyes and joy in my heart. THANK YOU…

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      1. You are so welcome, Kiki…I love this line: “I go and lie down where the wood drake
        rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” Living off the pond of the park we would go and feed the ducks or just watch them…sometime they’d venture into our yard and we would be so delighted! Some years in the Spring, they’d nest. sitting on their eggs under our tulip tree, laurel bush and rhododendrons…

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