Category: Inspire

Walking. These boots are made for walkin’…

Live & Learn44 Comments

I don’t stroll. I don’t meander. Or stop to catch-up. Or walk sipping coffee. I don’t sit on park benches contemplating my fate.

Move fast, talk straight, get it done. Next! #BePatient? Ahhhh, no.

Late March. It’s still fresh, oh so very fresh. I’m marching through the Park at 4 a.m., pre-dawn, usual story. Just another morning on the same path I’ve walked a thousand + times. Pitch black.

Kate Fagan: “You just never f****** know what’s going to happen next in this life—okay?

I walk…

These boots are made for walkin’
And that’s just what they’ll do
One of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you (Nancy Sinatra, 1966)

Nope, I didn’t see it. No sixth sense, no gut intuition, no unconscious memory map of treacherous obstacles.

My toecap catches a large rock, and I’m airborne. Yes, in that split second, it was all in slow motion. Instinctively, the body did respond:

  1. Clutch cameras (PROTECT THE GEAR AT ALL COSTS NO MATTER WHAT DAMAGE TO BODY)
  2. WAIT! Wait just one millisecond. I can’t FACE-PLANT. I twist my right shoulder inward to absorb the blow.
Continue reading “Walking. These boots are made for walkin’…” →

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn14 Comments

These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify. I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun, or the light that makes a photograph look good. I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up. The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands. I love the gift of its arrival. The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. Always and again. And you think it is shared by everyone but it is not shared, exactly — our eyes are hit by our own, personal photons.

— Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren. (W. W. Norton & Company, September 19, 2023) (

Notes:

  • DK Photo 5:05 am Wednesday, June 25 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from yesterday’s daybreak walk here.
  • Thank you Make Believe Boutique for the Enright passage.
  • 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.

Saturday Morning

Live & Learn11 Comments

Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?

— Victoria Chang, “Passage” in The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022)

Notes:

  • DK Photo at 4:11 am at Oyster Shell Park, Norwalk, CT. 59° F, with heavy rain. More photos from this morning’s walk here.
  • Poem via Read A Little Poetry

Walking. With God(s).

Live & Learn38 Comments

Walking, 1,769 consecutive (almost) days in a row at Cove Island Park at Daybreak. Like in a row.

Daylight Savings Time change has brought out the Humans. Strike 1.
It’s high tide. Strike 2.
No clouds. Strike 3.
A trifecta signaling a poor photo day.

I walk.

The morning begins to turn.
Lailah, a shepherd mix, is ahead of me. That’s her in photo above.
She can smell the old guy with candy.
Her Mom struggles to contain her, Lailah’s giddy with full body wiggles and a fluffy white tail frantic with anticipation.

Continue reading “Walking. With God(s).” →

What a beautiful balloon I’m carrying with me.

Live & Learn26 Comments

So you were dealing with the feelings we talked about earlier, and you got to a point where you decided your life had to change. One of the things that then changed your life was birding. How did you find it? In the spring of 2023, just before I left The Atlantic, I moved to Oakland from D.C., and one thing that happened was I started paying attention to the birds around me. They were omnipresent in a way they weren’t before. On my first day in my new house, there was an Anna’s hummingbird in the garden. I would go for walks and hear birdsong: the melodious sound of a Pacific wren in a nearby redwood forest. I bought a pair of binoculars and would take it with me on neighborhood walks or hikes. I would have Merlin while I was working and look up occasionally and go: “Oh, that’s interesting. It’s an oak titmouse. I’ve never seen one before.” To me, the difference between being casually bird-curious and being an actual birder is making a specific effort to go and look at birds.

Going from passive to active. Exactly. So early September of 2023 was when I made my first trip to a local wetland to specifically look at birds and nothing else. That was, honestly, a life-changing moment.

Continue reading “What a beautiful balloon I’m carrying with me.” →