Category: Inspire

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn12 Comments

[…] I’m old but not when I go for a swim. A transformation takes place. In fact, it’s surprising how much younger the body feels in water.

What happens to the body in water — the flabby, bony, wrinkled body, I mean; my body, I mean — is a quiet miracle. You’re trudging along on land, reluctantly dragging the 1940s cargo vessel you’ve become, and then you step oh-so-carefully into the water.

As soon as your body feels the cool liquid element around you, you’re ageless. Memory takes you back to childhood, and you swim just as you did in your 20s, though this time you have brains.

And that’s the beauty of it. Age has endowed you with knowledge and experience. Now, in water, you have achieved the impossible. You’re young and old simultaneously. A wet Dorian Gray. […}

Obviously I feel none of that. I’m just an old man enjoying the water and the quiet, feeling peaceful if a bit tired, almost but not quite like an Irish selkie, who lives on land only temporarily, and whose true home is the sea.

— Roger Rosenblatt, from “Flabby, Wrinkled, Happy…I’m Old But Not When I Swim” (NY Times, August 2, 2025)

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn16 Comments

I was talking with Calder one day in his studio when suddenly a ‘mobile’ beside me, which until then had been quiet, became violently agitated. I stepped quickly back; thinking to be out of its reach. But then, when the agitation had ceased and it appeared to have relapsed into quiescence, its long, majestic tail, which until then had not budged, began mournfully to wave, and, sweeping through the air, brushed across my face. These hesitations, resumptions, gropings, clumsiness’s, the sudden decisions and above all that swan-like grace make of certain ‘mobiles’ very strange creatures indeed, something midway between matter and life. At moments they seem endowed with an intention; a moment later they appear to have forgotten what they intended to do, and finish by merely swaying inanely…” 

— Jean-Paul Sartre, from “Calder’s Mobiles” (1947) by Buchholz Gallery/Curt Valentin, New York, in a catalogue also titled Calder’s Mobiles

Notes:

  • Thank you Beth for the quote (via Alive on All Channels)
  • Photo: Eléments Démontables was suspended in the atrium of the Ruffin Building in Wichita, Kansas from 1975 until 2024, and is now in the collection of the Calder Foundation. An article “Giant Mobile Flies at Fourth” from The Wichita Eagle on March 9th 1975 when the mobile was originally installed. Source: The Five Largest Mobiles Worldwide That I’m Aware of by Marco Mahler. (All 5 happen to be by Calder.
  • 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 & Learn33 Comments

When life is full of tasks, obligations, and events, time carries us, too swiftly it seems, for is it not our perpetual protest about life that there is not enough time for this or that? But those who complain about that—myself at different phases of my life, too—forget how fortunate they are: Life does not guarantee that time has the capacity to carry us. Time flies, time is fleeting, but then there comes a moment when time, no longer nimble-footed, no longer winged, is for us to carry.”

— Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 20 2025)

Notes:

  • 50% of the way in. Tough subject (losing two sons to suicide) but beautifully written.
  • NY Times Book Review (May 21, 2025): “Writing Into the Abyss After the Death of Two Sons.” In “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” the novelist Yiyun Li endures the aftermath of unthinkable loss.”
  • Guardian Book Review: “‘Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li review – a shattering account of losing two sons”
  • 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 & Learn14 Comments

“No, eat the carrot first. Please.” She leaned forward, knife and fork on each side of the plate, a paper towel tucked in her collar. “It’s important.” He finished the carrot, then picked another from the bowl and put the whole thing in his mouth. “They’re good for you, believe me.” … “For the eyes, right?” “That’s a lie… Carrots,” she paused for effect, “give you the will to live.” “What do you mean?” he said, chewing. “It’s a root. And roots prevent you from getting the blues.” She picked one from the bowl; it gleamed under the kitchen light. “You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.”

— Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel (Penguin Press, May 13, 2025)

Notes:

  • NY Times Book Review: “Odd Couple Roommates, Bonds by Pills and Precarity. Ocean Vuong’s florid new novel, which seeks to find the dignity in dead-end jobs.”
  • Guardian Book Review: “‘Heartbreak and hope”
  • 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.

Walking. 5 years, and counting.

Live & Learn28 Comments

4:30 a.m. yesterday morning.
Forecast called for 90% to 100% cloud cover, and light rain. Again, damn it. Rinse & Repeat.
I stare at the app, irritated.
I pay $50 / year for this smartphone app, and it’s consistently wrong.
Yet, I pay.
And I believe.
And I walk.
Oh, Lord. Let it be wrong again today.
And light rain it did; Rain enough to keep the pesky humans at home.
But it let up.
And there I am. Alone. Standing on the break wall, with the fog lifting.
I snap the shot. I stare at the LCD screen, and I don’t see what I see in front of me.
The HuMan tool can’t capture it.
Beautiful can’t describe it. Ethereal.

Painter Giorgio Morandi: “One can travel this world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it’s necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see...Nothing, or almost nothing in this world is truly new, what’s important is the new, different perspective an artist chooses to look at the world.”

It’s been 1,828 consecutive (almost) days on this Cove Island Park walk. Like in a row.

Yes, it’s the same Cove Island Park track. May 5th makes it the 5 year anniversary of this walk.

And, the Magic Show goes on.

Notes: See other photos from Wednesday morning’s walk here.