I can't sleep…
To hear Joni Mitchell (79) hit certain notes again in that inimitable voice was like glimpsing, in the wild, a magnificent bird long feared to have gone extinct.
— Lindsay Zoladz, Joni Mitchell Returns to the Stage, Golden, Glorious and in Control (NY Times, June 11, 2023)
You think when you wake up in the morning yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothing else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I don’t know what all. Start over. And then one morning you wake up and look at the ceiling and guess who’s laying there?
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Notes:
The lesson, so simple yet so difficult, is that life can be savored even though it contains hardship, disappointment, loss, and even brutality. The choice to see its beauty is available to us at every moment.
— David Von Drehle, The Book of Charlie: Wisdom From the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man (Simon & Schuster, May 23, 2023)
Notes:
Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind.
Air that flowers held
for awhile…
So these moments count for a lot—peace, you know.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up.
Cool, cool minutes.
No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
This is what the whole thing is about.
—William Stafford, from “Just Thinking” in Allegiances
Notes:
So it had to come. It was only a matter of time.
It’s been 1,129 consecutive (sort of, almost, consecutive) days on this morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
Yet, most recent mornings at the Park were absorbed by this little family. I scrapped the walk, ignored my step counts, and stood to watch them start their day. Are they up yet? Having breakfast? It’s been one month of cygnet posts, coincidently, one month to the day when I shared “Guess who has arrived?!?!?!”
I stopped by the nest. High tide had swamped it, and washed away all the straw that Mom and Dad had so carefully constructed for the nest.
Embers flickering, I’m inhaling smoke from the Canadian wildfires. I couldn’t find them. A mallard, yes. A scruffy gosling, yes. But no cygnet. And no swans. And all that I seemed to have left were these lines from Szilvia Molnar:
At any given moment, it was a necessity. Funny how quickly I had lost the idea of “any given moment.” Momentum implying something similar to “movement, motion, moving power” but also “alteration, change” over a “short time,” having a longer duration than “an instant,” ett ögonblick, a blink of an eye. As a puff of smoke giving in to air, I watched the moment disappear from me.
My cygnet and his parents were gone.
