I can't sleep…
“Nothing astounding, but everything beautiful.” (Jonathan Buckley, One Boat).
First major snowfall. 5:00 to 5:30 am. 32° F. Heavy snow. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
Don’t miss other shots from this morning’s walk here.
WAIT FOR IT! Time Lapse Video from Twilight to Sunrise. 1 hour in 22 seconds, 6:20 am to 7:20 am. 23° F, feels like 16° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
Don’t miss the photos from this morning’s walk here.
Neuroscientists tell us that awareness of beauty in one’s environment for a long time, reduces stress, can have physiological benefits, perhaps even longevity,” he explained. “And I realized that there’s not a day of my life that I didn’t see something beautiful.” He said some days he’s captivated by the way a stream of sunlight hits the wood paneling. Other days, he said, he sits enthralled watching the leaves dance in the wind through the windows. After more than seven decades, he’s convinced. “That’s my explanation. That’s the secret.”
— Vanessa Romo, who interviewed Roland Reisley (101 years old at the time) about his experience living for over 70 years in the “Reisley House, a home in the Usonia Historic District of Pleasantville, NY, designed for him by Frank Lloyd Wright. for over 70 years in 101 years of age who live in his house. (July 16, 2025, NPR Interview)
DK Photo taken at 11:18 a.m. on Nov 29 2024 as the late morning light streamed into our living room. One of those Roland Reisley moments I’ll never forget.
I made a brief visit to see my parents…My father was in the backyard feeding the birds. I hesitated to disturb him but felt an urgency to see him and quietly slipped out back. He was standing at the end of the yard with his back toward me with arms outstretched. As I stood in silence the birds flew to him and covered him, as if a fresco from the painter Giotto’s life cycle of St. Francis of Assisi. I could feel the birds’ affection for him, not merely because he fed them, but because they were responding to his innate goodness. At that moment I had no doubt that he was of a hallowed tribe. Not a perfect man, nor had he produced any known miracle, yet he had the simplicity of a saint, and I the saint’s errant daughter. Somehow sensing my presence, he turned as the birds flew above him and looked at me. Hello doll, he said. Hello, Daddy, I answered.
— Patti Smith, Bread of Angels: A Memoir (Random House, November 4, 2025)
Notes:
This month taxes a walker’s resources more than any other. For my part, I should sooner think of going into quarters in November than in winter. If you do feel any fire at this season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it is your own. It is but a short time these afternoons before the night cometh in which no man can walk. If you delay to start till three o-clock, there will be hardly time left for a long and rich adventure, to get fairly out of town. November Eat-heart, is that the name of it? Not only the fingers cease to do their office, but there is often a benumbing of the faculties generally. You can hardly screw up your courage to take a walk when all is thus tightly locked or frozen up, and so little is to be seen in field or wood. I am inclined to take to the swamps or woods as the warmest place, and the former are still the openest. Nature has herself become like the few fruits she still affords, a very thick-shelled nut with a shrunken meat within. If I find anything to excite a warming thought abroad, it is an agreeable disappointment, for I am obliged to go willfully and against my inclination at first, the prospect looks so barren, so many springs are frozen up, not a flower, perchance, and few birds left, not a companion abroad in all these fields for me. I seem to anticipate a fruitless walk. I think to myself hesitatingly, shall I go there, or there, or there? And cannot make up my mind to any route, all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking and fronting the cold wind, so that I have to force myself to it often, and at random.
But then I am often unexpectedly compensated, and the thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July. I may meet with something that interests me, and immediately it is as warm as in July, as if it were the south instead of the northwest wind that blew.
— Henry David Thoreau, from his journal, 25 November 1857, in “Autumn: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau” (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1892) (via The Hammock Papers)
Notes: