Category: Life

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn9 Comments

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Notes:

  • Quote: Thank you Kurt via Cultural Offering
  • DK Photo @ Cove Island Park this morning. More photo’s here and 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.

Lightly Child, Lightly

Live & Learn24 Comments

Finally day breaks over things that I can’t predict, as I cannot predict myself. Only a stone, a celestial body, a fool can, sometimes, be predictable. Finally day breaks over a circumstantial, differentiated, risky, improbable world, as concrete, multicolored, unexpected, and, yes, beautiful as the one I see, feel, touch, admire.

— Michel Serres, in Italo Calvino’s from “Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance” in “The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays. Translated by Ann Goldstein. (Mariner Books Classics, January 17, 2023) 

Notes:

  • Photo: Daybreak. 29° F, feels like 21° F.  6:00 to 7:00 am. March 16, 2023. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. See more photos from yesterday’s daybreak walk 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.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn37 Comments

Daybreak. September 7, 2020. 6:20 to 6:40 am. 67° F. Humidity: 86%. Wind: 6 mph. Gusts: 11 mph. Cloud Cover: 4%. The Cove, Stamford, CT

Lightly Child, Lightly

Live & Learn10 Comments

“Although light is coming down from the top of the piece, it appears to rise from the bottom like the light that rises in the east as the sun goes down in the west, when you are actually looking at the shadow of the earth projected into the atmosphere. In painting, two dimensions are used to allude to three dimensions. Here there is a picture plane which appears to have two dimensions, but that turns out not to be the case. There seems to be a surface that is not there. Here there is a sense of touch, a desire to feel, but there is no object, just as there is no image and no point of focus. There is only perception of itself. There is a tension from the state of desiring touch or from knowing there is something there to touch but not having done it. There is, of course, nothing to touch. The feeling comes with the eyes and the eyes have a feeling as important as physical touch. Just like the moment when you first meet someone and you have yet to touch, to kiss, or to make love. Then the tension exists from not having done it. Here the tension cannot be satisfied by touch and so it is sustained. The eyes do the touching.”

– James Turrell, from “James Turrell: A Retrospective” by Michael Govan  & Christine Y. Kim 

Notes:

  • Photo: James Turrell’s Skyspace, Houston in Texas Monthly, June 2012. Quote via noosphe
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly

Live & Learn17 Comments

“Thinking about daylight and artificial light I have to admit that daylight, the light on things, is so moving to me that I feel it almost as a spiritual quality. When the sun comes up in the morning – which I always find so marvelous, absolutely fantastic the way it comes back every morning – and casts its light on things, it doesn’t feel as if it quite belongs in this world. I don’t understand light. It gives me the feeling there’s something beyond me, something beyond all understanding.”

– Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres

Notes:

  • Photo: Stephen Carroll FotoFiction (via Mennyfox55). Quote via noosphe
  • 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.”