I can't sleep…
Notes:
As I held her, I rocked back and forth, swaying left foot to right. My mother told me that her mother, raised on a farm north of Saskatoon, had called this the Saskatchewan shuffle. But every mother knows it, that swaying. Every mother calls it something. Sometimes you will see a woman doing it instinctively, her arms empty, when she hears the crying of a stranger’s baby.
— Leslie Jamison, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story (Little Brown and Company, February 20, 2024)
Notes: NY Times Book Review by Kate Dwyer: “The High Priestess of the Personal.” Photo: Kristina Paukshtite
this life gives us only so many hours
to share & how we share, i worry,
is wasteful-Sunday night & the tv on,
so we don’t look at each other.
on screen some reality tv stars
threaten to choke each other out.
my love, we are bad television,
happy as we are to hold hands
& eat greasy pizza together
during these small breaths
before Monday arrives like a fist.
— Josè Olivarez, “Sunday Love” in “Promises of Gold” (Henry Holt & Company, February 14, 2023) (via Alive on All Channels)
Here’s shot 1 at 6:10 a.m. in series of goose bump moments. More photos from this morning’s walk here.
“that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light — in which we are washed and washed out of our bones” — Mary Oliver, from “White Owl Flies into And Out of the Field” in “Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver” (Penguin Press, October 10, 2017)