Category: Life

Walking. What are hands for?

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hands

It’s 2 pm.

There’s phone chatter on the floor, fingers tapping on keyboards, a high speed printer spitting out copies, and the hum of florescent ceiling lights providing percussion.

The Modern Manufacturing Plant. And my Home away from Home.

I’ve been anchored to my seat since 5:30 am – an 8-hour shift and the meter continues to run.

I shift uncomfortably left, then right. The lower back groans.  My step counter reports 1,704 steps, 8,296 steps short of the daily target. But it’s not enough, not nearly enough to get me up and around and moving.  This soul’s chained to the wheel, with Kyo Maclear’s “pessimistic disposition, a perfectionist quality mixed with a sense of inadequacy…striving leading to suffering.”  My rocket fuel. Sucking on its straw, tanks strapped on tight, wired for production, banged up, leading Lombardi’s sweep, 4 yards in a cloud of dust.

I’m finishing up a telephone conversation and the phone cuts out. Continue reading “Walking. What are hands for?” →

Lightly child, lightly.

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light

Without a key, light enters
with its hot blond muzzle
and lies upon the body;
and the body stirs and remembers.”

~ Ruth Stone, closing lines to “Light,” In the Next Galaxy

 

Notes:

  • Photo: cutvaya via newthom. Stone quote: Memory’s Landscape
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • 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.”

Tuesday Morning Wake-Up Call

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hair-back-black-and-white

The invented person, borrowed from the real—abstracted, isolated—is the person we finally know, or feel we know.  I make myself up from everything I am, or could be.

For many years I was more desire than fact.

When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.”

—Stephen Dunn, from “Notes” in Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs

 

Notes: Photo – Eric Rose Photography. Quote: – W.W. Norton

I’m very much in love with where I’m from

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william-christenberry-palmist-building-summer-alabama

“Palmist Building (Summer), Havana Junction, Alabama,” 1980.

palmist-building-winter-william-christenberry

“Palmist Building (Winter), Havana Junction, Alabama,” 1981.

Sarah Edwards: The photographer William Christenberry was often described as a chronicler of a decaying American South. It is true that in much of his work—shots of older buildings emptied of people, beams gap-toothed and nature ready to overtake—there is an attraction to what is passing, or what has passed. But Christenberry rejected the idea that his work was a lamentation or an elegy…“I feel that I’m very much in love with where I’m from. I find some old things more beautiful than the new, and I continue to seek those places out, and I go back to them every year until sooner or later they are gone.” Continue reading “I’m very much in love with where I’m from” →

Just for the joy of it

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bird-chicadee-branch-jpg

What is worth singing about? What if the song is too small? Books will tell you that birds sing for a number of reasons— to call to each other, to warn of predators, to navigate, to attract mates. But I wasn’t so much interested in what the books believed. I wanted to know what the musician believed. “Why do birds sing?” So, at the end of our first bird walk together, I asked. I wanted him to say they sing because they have to, because they must, because it is part of their very essence, an irrepressible need. […]

Slowly the musician nodded his head. Finally, he said, “Okay. It’s possible that birds may sing just for the joy of it.” I don’t know why his response made me so happy but it did.

~ Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation 

 

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