Author: Live & Learn

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn22 Comments

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

— Brian Doyle, from “Joyas Voladoras” The American Scholar, March 20, 2022

Photos: Lukas Souza in Foz do Iguaçu, Brasil

I’ve run away but I find the moon everywhere I go

Live & Learn27 Comments

I’ve been getting text messages from the moon. A note flashes on my phone, asking if the moon can track my location, and I consent.

I have moved to a new city but the moon is following me around. It texts to tell me when it will be out. Through the windows, there is just a parallelogram of sky at the top of the courtyard, only a small space to catch the passing moon on certain clear nights…

The app uses my location to tell me the moon’s phase, direction, distance at all times. Right now, the moon is 384,012 miles away from my hand, which is holding my phone close to my heart, as I sit at the table in the narrow kitchen of this flat with tall windows in an old-style apartment block, stinging nettles by the front door. I’m just home from work, vibrating with tiredness. The moon is waxing gibbous and is 25.2 degrees above the horizon, almost due east. It rose just after midday and will set around 3 a.m…

The internet is hectic and I go to the moon to relax, opening new browser tabs for the moon’s Wikipedia page and Google Maps of its surface. I follow new lunar developments from NASA. I learn that the moon was probably once part of the earth, sheared off by an asteroid. B, who moved from Scotland to Tasmania, tells me that there is a different moon in the southern hemisphere: it waxes and wanes in the opposite direction. I learn that the moon is slowing down the earth’s rotation. The moon is holding on to us…

I’ve run away but I find the moon everywhere I go…

The lunar cycles are almost all I have in my diary for the year. My future is blank but I know what the moon will be doing…

People in this town can’t commit to anything, but the moon is always orbiting and the months pass relentlessly. I don’t speak the language but I know ‘der Mond’. My attachment to the moon grew during the years I’ve been lonely and so did the moon’s attachment to me. The moon, I tell B, is my boyfriend.

— Amy Liptrot, from her Prologue titled “February Hunger Moon” in The Instant (Canongate Books, March 3, 2022)

Notes:

  • Waning Crescent Moon (25%). DK @ Cove Island Park, 37° F. 5:33 a.m. Sunday, March 27, 2022. More Photos from this morning here.
  • Book Review of “The Instant” in The Guardian

Saturday Morning. Why I Wake Early.

Live & Learn29 Comments

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

—  Mary Oliver, from “Mindful” in Why I Wake Early.

Notes:

  • Photo: DK @ 6:03 a.m. this morning. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. 47F. More photos from this morning here.
  • Mary Oliver via Alive on All Channels

Walking. On a spot with billions of years left to run.

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689 days, almost consecutive. Almost in a row. This daybreak walk at Cove Island Park.

I pause for a moment, looking up at those clouds, their reflection on that water, standing in this silence —  a sacred moment, on sacred ground, could it possibly be a religious experience? For a non-church goer? For one wobbling on a fence?

You’ve stood in this same exact spot over 100x in the past 2 years.

What is that you feel?

“Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.” Richard Powers, The Overstory.

 

DK Photo on Weed Ave, Stamford, CT. 5:54 a.m. March 25, 2022. More photos from this morning here.

Lightly Child, Lightly

Live & Learn15 Comments

Drifting, what am I like?

A gull between earth and sky.

—  Du Fu, (712- 770). “Thoughts While Traveling At Night”, trans. by Vikram Seth, in Three Chinese Poets: Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu

Notes:

  • Photo – DK @ Cove Island Park on March 21, 2022. Quote via antigonick
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”