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.
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.
My friend Francis couldn’t play the piano, couldn’t or simply wouldn’t, wouldn’t or just wasn’t, and whatever the reason was I didn’t like the sound of it, so we made a bargain: if he could not play for himself, I would call him every morning and he would play the piano for me. It would be my job to listen and his job to play, a mutual task, as I needed obligations, and he needed to leave his mind and return to his hands… Each of my calls with Francis began the same way—brief hellos, how are you feeling, then one of us would ask the other whether they were ready, and the reply was always the same. We were always ready. I had pictured myself writing as Francis played scales or practiced songs, but for the first few days his hands hardly remembered the keys, and I had nothing to work on, no thoughts worth keeping, hardly any thoughts at all. He played slowly, sometimes with a metronome, shards of chords or songs in parts for no more than a few minutes, but after a week he began, as if by some miracle, to sing, and I muted myself and folded onto the floor to cry, not for him and not for myself and not for anything other than the fact that any pattern can be broken, that there is no end of patterns breaking down. Weeks went by and months went by, and I called him from different cities, different rooms, and over time he could play a little longer, a little freer, songs he knew by heart and songs he was still trying to write. It was as easy as it was unusual, this distant company, this regular puncturing of our tendencies toward solitude and shut doors…
But then I thought of the mornings when Francis fumbled a note or fell short of his falsetto and how he used to shyly apologize, and how over time he stopped saying he was sorry and simply continued, allowing the errors to live.
NY Times Book Review: June 15, 2025 – A Relationship Breaks in Two. So Does the Book That Explains Why.Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book” is both an elliptical novella and a seething memoir. Decoding the connections is at once frustrating and exhilarating.
For centuries, people have gathered to honor this longest day— Celtic people lit hilltop fires, and Slavic communities wove flower crowns, leapt over bonfires, and floated wreaths down rivers to honor love, light, and life’s turning. The Summer Solstice is no ordinary day— it is a threshold between seasons, a celebration of the earth at her peak of light. Let this be your moment to honor all that has grown within you— dreams tended in quiet, wounds turned into wisdom, love that kept showing up. The Solstice teaches us not just to feel the warmth on your skin, but in your soul and to stand in our radiance— fully, gently, without apology. So lift your face to the Sun, feel the pulse of life in your chest, and remember: you, too, are part of this sacred rhythm of the world. A Soul blooming in time with the turning Earth.
Paul Simon, 83, has simply changed his mind about a farewell to touring that he announced in 2018, with a valedictory arena tour that ended with a park concert in Queens. He had more to say and sing. He’s back on the road with a relatively intimate, scaled-down postscript: his A Quiet Celebration tour. It’s booked into theaters selected for their acoustics, and it’s made possible by an advanced monitoring system that helps him cope with his recent severe hearing loss. […]
In 2023, Simon released “Seven Psalms,” a continuous 33-minute suite of songs about the brevity, fragility and preciousness of life — “Two billion heartbeats and out / Or does it all begin again?” […]
He opened his Beacon Theater concert with a full performance of that album wearing a blazer, without his usual ball cap. The suite’s sections are loosely held together by delicate guitar picking patterns, recurring vocal lines and occasional refrains. But they also explore enigmatic tangents and dissolve into abstract sounds. In the best way, “Seven Psalms” sounds like someone thinking aloud, melodically and philosophically. […]
Between songs, Simon spoke about musical constructions. He teased instantly recognizable “guitar figures” from Simon & Garfunkel songs before playing a weary, countryish version of his touring-musician’s lament, “Homeward Bound.” He explained “Rewrite” — sung by a burned-out character wishing he could rewrite his life story — as growing out of a beat and a quick-fingered guitar lick.
Simon’s songs have had grown-up concerns for decades. He sang about parenthood in “Graceland” and “St. Judy’s Comet.” He sang about inevitable disillusionment in “Slip Slidin’ Away.” He sang about reluctant breakups, wistfully, in “Train in the Distance” and drolly in “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” And after explaining how he saw a song title in a photo caption, he sang about romance, art, consumerism and the power of music in “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” in the pointillistic arrangement from his 2018 album “In the Blue Light.”
His reedy voice is weaker and scratchier than it once was, but he was still game, reaching for high notes in “Slip Slidin’ Away” and “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” The restrained volume and the age of the audience made the room reluctant to sing along until near the end of the set. But when “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” arrived, and when Simon suggested “Sing!” during “The Boxer,” loud singalongs sprang up. For all his intricacies, he always knew how to write a hook.
Soft days, with a gentle breeze, create a pause. Just enough to notice how tall grass sways, leaves breathe, clouds swim, and rose petals fall. Here’s to a kind day or night. Here’s to recalibrating in the way that helps you most.
