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Lightly Child, Lightly.

May 18, 2023 by 13 Comments

I like to follow the path that nature gives me. Much of what happens in life is not in my power; most events are the outcome of stuff that happened thousands of years ago and will have outcomes of their own in years to come. I adapt and enjoy and refuse to fight the things that can’t be fought, I let go of the questions that cannot be answered and instead I push at doors that fall open to my touch and ignore the ones that resist too much. I have worked hard, tried hard, learned that life has flow and that resisting it brings problems. I’ve known people who fight too hard for what they want—fighting and wanting become a way of life and they never stop and never get happy. I ride streams that are going my way, share moments with people who are friendly, stroke relaxed dogs and approachable cats, cut the grass when the sun shines, shelter when it rains, and so on. Instead of standing in the ocean and feeling its swell pushing at me, trying to resist its push and then staggering and falling, I like to lift my feet just a little and be lifted. Bobbing effortlessly along like a leaf in a rill, turning this way and that to look at the world as it passes—enjoying the ride. That doesn’t mean simply accepting the ways of people. Injustice, cruelty and greed must be addressed, but I try to do it with love, with understanding and compassion. Not to confront, but to gently open a better, kinder desire-path for the stream to flow into because it’s easier. Some people, of course, are beyond the ability to change and so must be resisted. It’s not all plain sailing.

I wasn’t always a follower of the path. I wanted to be a writer and I tried so hard, entering, applying, but the doors remained so tightly closed that my knuckles bled from knocking. Then I gave up fighting and fell in love again with life, wrote the poetry of my days and the things that woke me in the early hours, demanding to be held in the mind for a moment and be seen. Now I don’t care about ‘being’ anything, I like writing for fun. Desire got in the way and slowed me down. I do what the moment tells me to do, instinctively. Of course I make plans of a vague, uncertain kind but I’m not overly attached to them.

—  Marc Hamer, Spring Rain: A Life Lived in Gardens (Greystone Books, April 4, 2023)

Notes:

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Lightly Child, Lightly.

April 27, 2023 by 14 Comments

Their experiences in the world are involvingly varied: one was a nurse in Colombia, another an orchid keeper in Vietnam. But as I prompt them with questions to write about, I feel repeatedly surprised by how alike their answers sound. 

What do you miss from your past? 

The warmth of home, the smell of grandmother’s cooking. 

What is life like in the present? 

Confusing. Lonely. 

What surprises you about Denver? 

People sleeping on the streets. In my country they’d be with family. 

When you picture your future, what do you hope? 

Safe children. To feel at home. To live my dreams.

— John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)

 

Notes:

  • 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.

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Lightly Child, Lightly.

April 6, 2023 by 15 Comments
I loved weather, all weather, not just the good kind. I loved balmy days, fearsome storms, blizzards, and spring showers. And the colors! Everyday brought something to be admired: the soft feathery patterns of cirrus clouds, the deep, dark grays of thunderheads, the lacy gold and peach of the early morning sunrise. The sky and its moods called to me.
 
— L. Jagi Lamplighter, Prospero Lost (Tor Books; August 4, 2009)

Notes:

  • Photo: Daybreak. 41° F, feels like 36° F.  6:00 to 6:56 am. March 26, 2023. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning’s walk here.
  • Quote via Exhaled Spirals
  • 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.

 

 

 

 

 

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Lightly Child, Lightly.

March 23, 2023 by 16 Comments

My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything – no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn’t think of form by the ocean. You can go in if you don’t encounter anything. A world without objects, without interruption, making a work without interruption or obstacle. It is to accept the necessity of the simple direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.

— Agnes Martin, Agnes Martin: Writings

Notes:

  • Photo: Daybreak. March 18, 2023. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning’s walk here.
  • Quote. Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
  • 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.

 

 

 

 

 

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Lightly Child, Lightly.

January 3, 2023 by 20 Comments

“…that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing quite impossible to capture.”

—  Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark (Vintage; February 16, 2011, first published 1932)

Notes:

  • Photo: During yesterday’s Daybreak walk. 33° F. 7:11 to 7:33 am. January 2, 2023. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.  More photos here.
  • Quote via CODA
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly.

December 29, 2022 by 24 Comments

“Memorize places,” his uncle had told him. “Settle your eyes on a place and learn it. See it under the snow, and when first grass is growing, and as the rain falls on it. Feel it and smell it, walk on it, touch the stones, and it will be with you forever. When you are far away, you can call it back. When you need it, it is there, in your mind.”

― Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway

Notes:

  • Photo DK @ Daybreak. 32° F. 7:00 am to 7:31am. December 28, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More pictures from yesterday morning’s walk here.
  • Quote: Thanks Beth @ Alive on All Channels.
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly.

December 15, 2022 by 11 Comments

A year never passes without me thinking of them. India. Erica. Their names are stitched inside every white coat I have ever worn. I tell this story to stitch their names inside your clothes, too. A reminder to never forget. Medicine has taught me, really taught me, to accept the things I cannot change. A difficult-to-swallow serenity prayer. I’m not trying to change the past. I’m telling it in order to lay these ghosts to rest.

You paint feverishly, like Mama. Yet you got the steadfastness of Daddy. Your talents surely defy the notion of a gene pool. I watch you now, home from college, that time after graduation when y’all young people either find your way or slide down the slope of uncertainty. You’re sitting on the porch nuzzling the dog, a gray mutt of a pit bull who was once sent to die after snapping at a man’s face. In the six years we’ve had him, he has been more skittish than fierce, as if aware that one wrong look will spell his doom. What I now know is that kind of certainty, dire as it may be, is a gift.

The dog groans as you seek the right place to scratch. I wish someone would scratch me like that. Such exhaustion in my bones. I will be sixty-seven this year, but it is time. I’m ready to work in my yard, feel the damp earth between my fingers, sit with my memories like one of those long-tailed magpies whose wings don’t flap like they used to. These days, I wake up and want to roll right over and go back to sleep for another hour. Yes, it is time.

— Dolen Perkins-Valdez, opening lines to “Take My Hand” (Berkley, April 12, 2022) 

Notes:

  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly.

December 8, 2022 by 20 Comments
Not far from the city I had a secret refuge, a small cove that I liked to visit at the kindling of the morning star. At that hour there was nothing more translucent under heaven than the shallow sea between the rocks. The seabed was everywhere visible and the water, blue as an eye, grew lighter the closer you got to the surface, until it turned green, then vanished—and I breathed it in.
It was there that the god found me.

– Sjón, The Whispering Muse

Notes:

  • Quote: Thank you Sawsan for sharing. 942 consecutive (almost) days in a row on this morning walk in my almost “secret refuge, a small cove that I liked to visit at the kindling of the morning star.” These words magic, capture it.
  • DK Photo @ Daybreak. 6:14 am. 48° F. December 8, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.  More pictures from this morning’s 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly.

November 17, 2022 by 12 Comments

It sometimes sweeps through him in quick glimpses like an illumination and yes, yes, then he’s filled with a kind of happiness and he thinks that there might be a place somewhere… what if everything could be like that? … He thinks about a place like that, which is obviously no place, he thinks, he falls into a kind of sleep that isn’t like sleep but more a bodily movement where he’s not moving… everything’s heavy and hard and there’s a place in the big heaviness that’s an unbelievably gentle shining light, like faith, yes, like a promise.

— Jon Fosse, The Other Name: Septology I-II.

Notes:D

  • DK Photo @ Daybreak. 67° F, with light rain. 6 am. November 12, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly.

October 27, 2022 by 20 Comments

I saw a man once, I waved to him and he did not wave back; I felt very self-conscious, partly because of how often I was walking this road. I walked until I got to the small cove we had driven past the first day we came here that had thrilled me so quietly; it still gave me a quiet sense of awe… And then I would walk back again.

— Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea: A Novel (Random House, September 20, 2022)

Notes:

  • Elizabeth Strout’s words spoke to me, this 905th consecutive day (almost, like in a row) on my morning walk at Cove Island Park.
  • Photos from yesterday’s morning walk @ Cove Island Park. More photos from yesterday’s 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly.

October 20, 2022 by 28 Comments

“It helped that my life slowed down. Quitting my media job played a big part in that, then Covid, then my cat’s sickness, and then eventually it felt like a choice—to invest more in my immediate surroundings, to learn to cook, to read more, to post less, to dream differently. The relief in that shift was recognizing how much the little stuff always mattered, even when I treated it like a nuisance. These days I really do believe that chores give my life meaning. Not just because they present texture and struggle and a necessary counterpart to rest (all true), but because maintenance is in itself profound. Caring for ourselves, for other people, for our homes, for plants and other animals—these are the unfinishable projects of our lives. We do them over and over not to conquer them, or for personal gain, but to maintain and nourish them, with no greater expectation. Given how swayed humans are by the pursuit of growth, wealth, ownership, and power, I think this is very sweet and pure. Almost spiritual.”

— Haley Nahman, #118: Mark this off your to-do list (Maybe Baby, October 18, 2022)

 

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.”

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Lightly Child, Lightly.

October 6, 2022 by 9 Comments

— Hanif Abdurraqib, from an Interview with Krista Tippett titled “Moments of Shared Witnessing” (Onbeing, April 29, 2021)

Notes:

  • Source: weltenwellen
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly.

September 29, 2022 by 20 Comments

— Lizzie, 18, while reminiscing on the webb telescope photos

Notes:

  • Source: boudicca
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly.

September 22, 2022 by 18 Comments

The answers were nearly always – light.

Light.

There.

The quick glow of a fierce sensation.

— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)

Notes:

  • Photo by DK @ Daybreak. 5:45 a.m. 60° F. September 17, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.  See more photos from that morning here.
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly

September 8, 2022 by 10 Comments

And one of the first questions she asked him was – What do you believe?

And Harry hardly had to think about it; he looked straight at her and said,

quite resolutely – I believe in the kindness of strangers.

It had been such a clean answer.
As sharp and true as his own
particular cleverness, and Lia had felt
somewhere deep within her a bud of affection
drinking and breaking.
An exhale of pure oxygen in an otherwise polluted place.

— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)

Notes:

  • Photo: Said Photographer via Pexels
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly

September 2, 2022 by 34 Comments

This day of mine
was lost
like all the other days,
half of it thinking of yesterday,
half of it thinking of tomorrow.

— Abbas Kiarostami, A Wolf Lying in Wait: Selected Poems, (tr. by Karim Emami & Michael Beard)

Notes:

  • Portrait of Abbas Kiarostami in Cinematheque
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly

August 25, 2022 by 19 Comments

You will recall the young age, when you realized that you wanted to act or write or paint or dance. You’re very young, and everything is a dream waiting to be fulfilled, and everyone who has created something that moved or amused or changed you is a hero, an idol, someone to emulate. Some people never get past this phase, and they will never believe that anyone–no matter how great–is ever as talented or worthy as those childhood idols.

This is one form of artistic suicide, and I see it often. You cannot allow your standards to calcify at that tender and impressionable age, set by what you loved in your bedroom when you knew nothing and furiously felt everything. Those loves and influences will be your foundation, the scaffolding upon which you add everything else, but it cannot be the end of your development.

There is then the realization, through the duck press that is the professional theatre, when you realize how much you do not know and how many things you cannot do or do well.
You have two choices: You can deny the reality of your situation and look upon those who try to shape you or educate you as imbeciles or enemies, or you can look at yourself brutally and honestly and try to become the best artist you can be. An awful lot of people, the majority, sadly,-choose the former route, and they rail against the theatre or film or dance, and they maintain that they are so special that they cannot be understood by those who are sell-outs or favored or compromised.

—  Elia Kazan, from “Elia Kazan: Artistic Suicide” in Follies of God by James Grissom

Notes:

  • Quote Source: Wait-What? Via Follies of God. Eliza Kazan portrait via Frank Beacham’s Journal.
  • Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 6:51 a.m. May 8, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
  • Kazan writes: “I don’t move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme.”
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly

August 11, 2022 by 52 Comments

In the midst of financial news that seems to get grimmer by the day, one story of a man trying to escape caught my eye. Andrew Formica, the 51-year-old CEO of a $68 billion investment firm, abruptly quit his job. He did not have another job waiting—or anything else, it seems. When pressed about his plans, he said, “I just want to go sit at the beach and do nothing.”

Easy, right? Not for a lot of us, it isn’t. Besides the fact that you need to have a good deal of financial security to quit working, “it is awfully hard work doing nothing,” as Algernon said in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I can relate to this. I work long hours and have sometimes planned to go away and do nothing just for a week or two. But when I try, I find I am utterly incompetent: Idle chitchat drives me crazy; I get the jimmy legs 30 minutes into a movie; sitting on a beach is a form of torture. Whenever I make an effort to rest, my mind always wanders back to the work I am fleeing.

As difficult as it may be, Formica has the right idea. For the sake of happiness, strivers and hard-driving work machines of any income level need to learn to stop. If you are in this category, nothing should be high on your to-do list

…

Choose soft fascination.

During your unstructured vacation, choose activities that can gently hold your attention while also leaving you plenty of bandwidth to mentally meander. This is what three University of Michigan psychologists call “soft fascination,” and you might find it by walking in nature, or watching the waves. In contrast, “hard fascination” (found by, say, watching television) occupies attention and rules out mind-wandering. Research has found that soft fascination is more restorative than hard fascination. For example, in a 2018 study, survey respondents said that walking in nature was 15 percent more effective at helping them “get away from it all” than watching television…

If scheduling leisure seems unnatural to you, consider the way good health requires you to schedule your meals and exercise at more or less a certain time each day for a particular amount of time. Schedule “white space” in your day, and keep it off-limits from the tyrannical urgencies of your work (as well as from eating and exercise). If your guilt creeps in, or if you’re worried that “wasting” this time will somehow make you poorer, try to remember the words of the Welsh poet William Henry Davies: “A poor life this if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare.”

— Arthur C. Brooks, from “How to Embrace Doing Nothing” (The Atlantic, August 4, 2022)

Notes:

  • Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 6:51 a.m. May 8, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly

July 21, 2022 by 24 Comments


The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound—
a small stone falling on a red leaf.

The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.

The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it, and now she thrives. …
Now is her time to thrive.

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.

—  Jane Kenyon, “Things” in “The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon: Poems”

Notes:

  • Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 5 am. May 16, 2022. 61° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from that morning here.
  • 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.”
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Lightly Child, Lightly (Take 2)

July 1, 2022 by 34 Comments

Thomas A. Edison was born in 1847, and on October 21, 1879, he invented the incandescent light bulb. I was born on October 21, 1947, one hundred years after Edison’s birth and on the sixty-eighth anniversary of his famous invention. By the time I discovered these facts, I was in my forties, but I had already developed a lifelong fascination with light.

Indeed, my first memory is of light dancing in the leaves of a tall tree in my grandmother’s front yard in Sparta, Missouri. Aunt Grace had placed me on my back on a blanket under this tree. I remember the sunlight sparkling through the changing colors of the fluttering leaves and the occasional patch of cloud shadow that affected everything. I didn’t have language, but I knew what I was watching was beautiful.

I remember nothing else about the first two years of my life, but I recall this as clearly as if it happened this morning. Light sticks in my memory that way. And ever since that seminal moment, dappled light has held the power to induce wonder in me.

I take note of shadows and sunspots and if a cloud crosses the sun. I stop to admire the sparkling dew on grass and flowers, the rainbows in lawn sprinklers, and the way certain kinds of light shine on birds’ wings or breasts. I notice my cat glistening in the sunbeams and the way light sparkles on nearby Holmes Lake. These minute alterations in light affect me emotionally and even spiritually.

When I swim, the parabolas of light dancing on the bottom of the pool make me happy. So does the way sunlight splashing through rain can paint my porch with light. When I see shafts of sunlight breaking through storm clouds, I pay attention. When we travel, it is light that most astonishes me. Light in the Sandhills of Nebraska, in Alaska, in San Francisco, and in all the mountain towns along the front range of the Rockies…

I am solar-powered. As a child, I spent every waking moment outdoors in the summer. I spent my mornings mixing mud pies, cookies, and cakes on wooden slabs under an elm tree. And I spent long afternoons and evenings in our municipal pool. That’s when I began reminding the other children to look at how sunlight twinkled on water. [Read more…]

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