In November,
the trees are standing all sticks and bones.
Without their leaves, how lovely they are,
spreading their arms like dancers.
They know it is time to be still.
Notes: Photo – Anna Williams. Poem Source: Your Eyes Blaze Out
Category: Life
Lightly child, lightly.
Like wind – In it, with it, of it.
Of it just like a sail, so light and strong that,
even when it is bent flat,
it gathers all the power of the wind without hampering its course.
Like light –
In light, lit through by light, transformed into light.
Like the lens which disappears in the light it focuses.
Like wind. Like light.
Just this – on these expanses, on these heights.
Notes:
- Photo: Patty Maher. Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
- 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.”
Riding Metro North. The Morning After…
Just another ordinary autumn morning in November. But, and it’s a big But, this one follows the U.S. Presidential election.
It’s the first train to Grand Central: the 5:01 am. The 1% fills this train. The traders, the bankers, the Suits, the professional class.
I am Them.
Overnight, the Earth has shifted, and cracked.
All heads in this train car are down. The gleaming late model Apple devices beam the story lines. “Election results driven by the poor white…the rural vote…the non-college educated…” These written words coming from the same college educated who got it all so wrong, are now anxiously explaining what went wrong and why, and they are soon to pivot to telling us what happens next. Stunned.
The Words coming from these pens and keyboards (and now digested by their Readers) are less confident today, less certain about outcomes, and fear a change of the status quo. Mary Oliver describes the anxiety in ‘Sister Turtle’: “You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.” Continue reading “Riding Metro North. The Morning After…”
Sunday Morning
Form is certainty. All nature knows this, and we have no greater adviser. Clouds have forms, porous and shape-shifting, bumptious, fleecy. They are what clouds need to be, to be clouds. See a flock of them come, on the sled of the wind, all kneeling above the blue sea. And in the blue water, see the dolphin built to leap, the sea mouse skittering; see the ropy kelp with its air-filled bladders tugging it upward; see the albatross floating day after day on its three-jointed wings. Each form sets a tone, enables a destiny, strikes a note in the universe unlike any other.
How can we ever stop looking?
How can we ever turn away?
~ Mary Oliver, from “Staying Alive” in Upstream: Selected Essays (2016)
Photo: Stefan Krauss @ Stars Fell on Livaniana (in Crete near village of Livaniana).
Saturday Morning
What I see in dreams
makes me breathe
shallow
like golden trout
floating just beneath
the skin of water
warmed by
late autumn’s
ticklish light
~ M.J. Iuppa, opening lines to “Something Brief, But Bright,” Small Worlds Floating: Poems
Notes: Art Source: mennyfox55. Poem Source: Memory’s Landscape