Why? Because people need songs like they need bread and water. People need poetry, beauty, love! So long as the sun rises and rivers flow, there will always be weddings and celebrations and music. Even fanatics cannot change that.
DK Photo of Sunrise from this morning @ 6:32 a.m. Don’t miss other sunrise photos here and the amazing time lapse here and our favorite white-tailed deer here.
People have been arguing that print is dead, or about to be dead… It is not dead in this house. We write in books. We dogear pages and underline passages and draw little stars in the margins. To read a book after my husband has read it is to have a window into his curious and wide-ranging mind.
I’m aware that a novel is not a thing. A poem is not a thing. Whether a story or a poem or an essay or an argument comes in through your ears or your eyes or your fingertips doesn’t change the alchemy that happens in reading: the melding of writer and reader, one human heart in communion with another, and with all the others, past, present, and future, who have read the same book. That magic is unrelated to the delivery system of a text. It happens whenever and however a person reads.
Nevertheless.
I will always prefer a book I can hold in my hand, the kind that smells of paper and glue, the kind whose unfolding I control, no button or touchscreen involved, by flipping backward and forward with pages ruffling between my fingers. The physicality of it pleases me. I listen to audiobooks on solo road trips, but I always switch back to the physical book as soon as I unpack. Reading a book on paper feels slower — calmer, stiller — than encountering any digital text.
For me, a book made of paper will always be a beautiful object that warms a room even as it expands (or entertains, or challenges, or informs, or comforts) a mind, and a bookcase will always represent time itself. I walk past one of our bookcases, and I can tell you exactly why a particular book is still there, never culled as space grew limited, even if there is no chance I’ll ever read it again.
When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.
It starts slowly as I walk from the meditation hall to lunch. When I sit down to eat, the food appears as a mixture of everything that was required to bring it to the table. I imagine all the land, dirt, sun, and water needed to grow a leaf or a single grain of rice. I imagine all the cells inside a potato that have been cared for as they’ve grown and were pulled from the soil. I see dirt in the wrinkles of hands that dig and plant and harvest. I see the death and decay of the plants that came before them, relinquishing one existence for another before being plucked up as something new. People drive machines and fix water systems. They crate, bag, and box the food and place it on trucks and ships and planes, which are created by other people with big, brilliant brains. I see minerals dredged from the earth to make steel and aluminum and iron and watch people melt it down and pour it into forms that make the machines that move it all across the world. I marvel that the chair I sit in is made of materials that required thousands of minds to perfect before becoming an instrument of my comfort. The rivets on the table, fastening the legs to the plank. The material of the tiles and the hands that laid them on the floor. The trees that become the skeleton of the building. The corrugated roof that keeps the rain and sun off the tables. The bowl that holds the food and the spoon and the water in the glass.
Eventually it all leads back to a parade of every picture I’ve ever made flashing behind my eyes as everything I can see becomes worthy of gratitude. It’s a feeling I’ve forgotten. And as nuts as it sounds, I can see one big, infinite cycle coming together as a single bite of food. For the second time in my life, the word complete is incomplete.
As it begins to overwhelm me I feel a bit batshit-crazy. But what’s crazy isn’t the recognition that so much is worthy of gratitude. What’s crazy is that I haven’t noticed it before as I replay my life in fast-forward, thinking of everything that moved me, fed me, and shaped me and I see how fortunate I have been. Being here at all is a display of my good fortune. I’ve been lucky not only to see the world but to continue to expand myself by changing my lens. A guy goes into a short, spiritual exile halfway around the world and wakes up: It’s a humorous trope and I’m not blind to it. But it’s not just the privilege of who I am and what I’ve been able to do. Likewise, the revelation is accessible to anyone at any time, and how they come to it isn’t really the point. It’s the privilege of living at all, and this is a privilege we all share despite how hard life can be at times. The duality of our sorrows and joys is the buy-in. That I have a body that lives and breathes and moves is a gift. I have a body and mind that gets to be depressed, that gets to navigate ceaseless thought.
Hazy Sunrise. Six photos between 6:29 to 6:50 a.m. 67° F. August 16, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More pictures from this morning’s walk at Cove Island Park here: 1) Twilight and 2) Brody and Wally Play Date.
Notes:
Post inspired by: “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery — air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.” — Sylvia Plath, “The Bell Jar” (Heinemann, 1963) (via Make Believe Boutique)
Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”
I wake up in a blue room and panic for a moment because I’ve forgotten where I am. Curtains with delicate floral patterns and tattered hems bend the shadows of iron bars. The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, moans though the windows. I brush the curtains aside and the damp air and words of the salāt al-fajr, the dawn prayer, spill in. Islamabad spreads out below me as clumps of dark shapes, interrupted by dots of orange and green. A streetlight. A kitchen window. A barking dog. The soft, sticky sound of tires on wet pavement. Several blocks away, the minaret of a mosque pierces the sky, illuminated against the darkness, and the muezzin calls out from the too-loud, tinny speakers. I can’t understand the words, but I appreciate how they compel a quarter of the world to fall to their knees in prayer five times a day.
Photo: Morning Group Prayer. 5:40 a.m. 61° F. August 13, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (I recognize this was not a Muslim prayer group, but was inspired by the moment and the book passage.) More photos from this morning’s walk here: (1) Daybreak & (2) Brody & Wally Play date.
