Category: Photography

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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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:

But then I am often unexpectedly compensated, and the thinnest yellow light of November…

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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:

  • Thank you The Hammock Papers for the Thoreau Quote.
  • DK Photos from this morning’s walk at The Cove @ Twilight. 5:15 to 5:45 am. 35° F. November 12, 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT

Saturday Morning…

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Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity.

— Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (Radical Thinkers). Translated by James Benedict (Verso, June 9, 2009)

Notes:

  • Beth, thank you for the quote via Alive on All Channels
  • DK Photo at 7:09 am at Cove Island Park this morning. More shots from this morning’s glorious sunrise here.

Sunday Morning

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For the past three decades, I have covered the dehumanizing cauldron that is our current politics, and the last decade has been particularly soul-crushing. I begin today a new column dedicated to reclaiming the humanity we are losing to the savagery of politics, the toxicity of social media and the amorality of artificial intelligence. One of the keys to that recovery is nurturing our innate sense of awe, the feeling we get when we contemplate something so vast and mysterious that it quiets our anxieties and ambitions and puts our differences and disagreements into perspective.

Continue reading “Sunday Morning” →

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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John Berger could have written a book called ‘Ways of Listening’. He listened with his whole body. As though my words were rain, and he was the earth. He absorbed everything, gathered every drop, missed absolutely nothing. His listening eyes were lakes in the high mountains. It was love, there’s no other word for it. I don’t think that stillness, that quality of attention, is even possible in digital-age humans, who suckle on mobile phones from the moment they’re born. It’s a generational thing. Lost forever, I believe.

– Arundhati Roy, “Mother Mary Comes to Me” (Scribner, September 2, 2025)

Notes:

  • John Berger portrait from Verso Books, October 2015.
  • Book Review NY Times: “She Raged. She Terrified. And She Shape Arundhati Roy. The prizewinning novelist’s unsparing memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” captures the eventful life and times of her mother, a driven educator and imperfect inspiration.”
  • 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.