Category: Life

Lightly child, lightly.

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bird-wings

But what about the ocean’s intensity that echoes our own,
the fever in cold weather, the soul’s descent?
What about the weight of the angels’ wings?

~ Etel Adnan, from Night

Notes:

  • Photo: via mennyfox55 .
  • Poem: Thank you the distance between two doors
  • 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.”

Running. Born Blue to Run.

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blue-art-sky

I’m less than mile in, on a planned five-miler. It’s not good. The worm flips the stomach over, and over, and over. Nausea. This will pass, don’t stop, run through it.

It doesn’t pass.

Bile backs up the throat, coats the molars and scurries forward. The gag reflex is triggered. I hunch over, hands clutch the knee caps. OMG. 

I stand upright, soldier-like, arms and hands hang. Eyes shut, tears slide down both cheeks, I make no effort to clear. I need this moment. Just a moment to re-grip. 

I grab the water bottle, gargle, and spew. Most clears, too much does not. A thick stream runs down the zipper line of the coat. Puking, on yourself, nice. 

I re-start. The north wind gusts and makes contact, tear ducts gush water, the track in front is a blur. Whoa. Easy does it. Continue reading “Running. Born Blue to Run.” →

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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rested-balance-work-carl-richards

Carl Richards, excerpts from Let 2017 Be the Year of Working Hard and Resting Hard (NY Times, Dec 19, 2016):

I’m tired — really tired — and I’m tired of being tired. In fact, it feels like I’ve been tired ever since I read Andrew Grove’s book “Only the Paranoid Survive” a decade and a half ago. That book was the beginning of a sea change in my thinking about work, business, hustling and survival itself — so much so that I’ve been working like a fanatic ever since.

Up at 5 in the morning? Tried it! Daily workouts? Yep. Paleo, bulletproof, gluten-free, cold showers? Check. Build a business, start a side hustle, dominate Twitter, Instagram and Facebook? Yeah, all that too! Make my family a priority? Of course. Serve in my community? Definitely. For 5,478 days, I’ve been hitting repeat, and it’s killing me.

I know I’m not alone. The last 10 years have felt like the #CrushIt decade. Every time you turn around, somebody is crushing something. Gary Vaynerchuk wrote the book on it, and according to him, people “need to work harder. And faster. There’s really nothing else to it. I’m exhausted every day, but I’m making all sorts of things happen in my 18 hours.”… Continue reading “Monday Morning Wake-Up Call” →

It happened on Christmas Eve, 48 years ago.

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earth

It happened on Christmas Eve, 48 years ago. Three men took turns reading from the first 10 verses of the Book of Genesis. They were nearly 250,000 miles away from Bethlehem, but since it was the night before Christmas, and there was no chimney from which to hang their stockings, the three astronauts inside the Apollo 8 capsule orbiting the moon thought it would be appropriate. So as Jim Lovell, Frank Borman and Bill Anders looked at the faraway Earth through the small window of the spacecraft, they read the verses: “In the beginning, God made the heavens and the Earth.”

Their distant-sounding voices from far beyond our atmosphere were broadcast live to the whole planet that night over radio and television. It was one of those moments that brought the world together, that helped us to see our common humanity…

~ Eric Metaxas, from Christmas Eve in Space and Communion on the Moon (wsj.com, Dec, 24, 2016)

 

Photo: Earth (Great Lakes). Canadian Space Agency/Chris Hadfield via Space.com

Running. With Pigeon.

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pigeon

Hundreds of pieces of lint bangin’ around upstairs, but none stretch into a fluffy middle or knit to a checkered flag at the end. Flash. Flash. Flash. Blah.  Nothing there. Nobody home. Nobody. Nothing.

When you bathe yourself in Mary Oliver poetry, her essays, her shorts – and when you waterboard your Blog followers with her Art, should there be any wonder of the source of the crippling doubt, the wellspring of inadequacy? Come on DK.

So here we go. In-n-out of her ethereal breezes to my…

Pigeon.

It’s daybreak, yesterday.  We’re on the way to Mianus River park for a trail run.  The gauge reads 27° F, and wind chill is knocking that down. We’re on a cross-street in Stamford, five miles out.  There’s no traffic. I stand at a red light. Anya‘s in the trunk, peeking between the head rests; outside, water vapor from the exhaust pipes spills into the cold and flurries of white smoke cloud the rear window.

My attention is pulled right. There he was.  A Pigeon. He’s sitting on a ledge on a wall of the building lining the street, at my eye level.  He’s looking at me, me at him. Continue reading “Running. With Pigeon.” →