Softest of mornings, hello.
And what will you do today, I wonder,
to my heart?
– Mary Oliver, from “Softest of Mornings” from Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
Notes: Poem (via litverve). Photo by nilay eren with (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
July 15, 2019 by 12 Comments
Sunday Morning
April 28, 2019 by 45 Comments
It’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves…
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
overflowing with blossomfoam…
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.
– Tony Hoagland from A Color of the Sky in What Narcissism Means to Me
Notes – Photo: Dogwood in Blossom by David Castenson. Poem: Thank you Whiskey River
Miracle. All of it.
March 15, 2019 by 22 Comments
Right now your heart is beating in utter darkness inside your chest.
~ Francis Weller, in The Geography Of Sorrow. Francis Weller On Navigating Our Losse
Notes:
- Sources: Quote – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo Credit
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
- Inspiration: “For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.” – Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1.
Walking Cross-Town. With a greeting party.
January 19, 2019 by 49 Comments
Yesterday. 3 a.m. I’m laying in bed, in darkness, exhausted. Eyelids, like anvils, won’t close. Won’t shut.
I’m swimming in Marina Benjamin’s head: “my head is lit up…like an out-of-hours factory…whirring generators flip on…lining up tasks in a shoulder-shoving queue…mostly I just fret, worry-beading problems and irritations…forming a manacle of woe.”
I have a 10 a.m. meeting in the city, an important meeting, with important people. The meeting is 7 hours away, like almost a full working day away, yet, I’m prepping. You need to sleep Friend, you will run out of steam by 10am.
It’s the 5:38 a.m. train to Grand Central. I can’t sleep. Can’t read. Can’t focus. I close my eyes and thoughts spin in a whirlwind, and then stop. Meditation. I’ve quit. It’s been three weeks. The app sits in the phone in my hand. The meditation prompts are a few clicks away. My fingers re-grip the phone. Now, do it now. You could use it now. [Read more…]
Sunday Morning
September 16, 2018 by 40 Comments
“Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody ‘What’s the story on that?’ and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That’s fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.”
– Tom Waits, in Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters edited by Paul Jr Maher
Miracle. All of it.
July 22, 2018 by 26 Comments
It must be a great disappointment to God
if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.
~ Mary Oliver, from “Good Morning” in Blue Horses
Notes:
- Photo: good4thesoul (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Sunday Morning
January 21, 2018 by 30 Comments
go to
some foreign place,
Juarez, say,
in Mexico,
and listen
to a large woman,
a powerful
laughing mother,
talk about
her children
crawling bare assed
on the dirt floor,
and about the way
roses grow
trellised on
an adobe wall,
and then
try to write it down
in a letter to a friend,
in English –
try to catch
the words
as she said them
until you recognize
there is no way
– no way at all –
to do it
except to take
your friend by the hand,
returning to Juarez,
and go to the woman,
the laughing woman,
and yes,
humbly,
listen
with awe.
~ Arthur Powers, “If You Would Read the Bible” from EchotheoReview
Notes: Poem Source – 3quarksdaily.com. Photo: George Marks
Lightly Child, Lightly.
December 28, 2017 by 21 Comments
You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there – the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed.
– Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale
Notes:
- Quote: Thank you Whiskey River. Photo by werner neururer (Austria) with Walk in the woods
- Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect 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.”
Truth
November 8, 2017 by 26 Comments
Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception. The child is enthralled, and then the mother comes into the room and says to the child, “That’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird.” Instantly the complex wave of the angel, peacock, iridescent, transformative mystery is collapsed into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. “This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky,” and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of disempowered perception.
~ Terence McKenna, Ordinary Language, Visible Language and Virtual Reality
Notes: Quote via cobotis. Photo: Ahmed via Eyeem via Newthom.com
Forget Calories. Go for Awe.
May 9, 2017 by 38 Comments
Excerpts from Julia Baird’s Forget Calories. Exercise for Awe. (May 6, 2017, NY Times):
If you joined the hundreds of people in my swim squad, you might think at first that the routine was simply about getting a solid bout of exercise before the day begins…The caps we wear are bright pink. The name we call ourselves, the Bold and Beautiful, is also quite daft, but it’s a reminder that the squad was formed several years ago by middle-aged women who were too nervous to swim the distance alone. This morning swim was never about skill, but about pluck.
Most days, at some spot along the mile-long route, heads will cluster, arms pointing down under the water at enormous blue groupers, white dolphins, color-changing cuttlefish, wobbegongs (bearded sharks), and even tiny turtles and sea horses. One summer, a white dolphin frequently appeared. At this time every year, gangs of young dusky whaler sharks swarm the bay, several feet beneath us, migrating only after they have already become large enough to make people nervous. There’s a reason a collective term for sharks is a shiver.
It’s not always sheer delight. Sometimes we emerge with red welts from stingers (usually jellyfish) across faces and limbs, and have to battle thickets of seaweed, powerful currents and crashing waves. But the daily difference in conditions is part of what makes it thrilling. One day, a whale glided into the bay and played with the swimmers for an hour — though I refuse to talk about it because I wasn’t there…My atheist friends who were there described it as like a prayer or quasi-religious experience; their faces turned solemn at the recollection… [Read more…]
