Notes:
It was Tuesday.
Another morning walk. 140 days, 140 consecutive days in a row.
My 5 mile loop to start each day. Same time. Same path.
I’m crawling out of bed a bit slower now, and wondering, “Maybe I take today off?” Days are getting shorter. Mornings darker. The sheen of watching daybreak, the first light illuminating the horizon, do I dare say, is becoming boring?
But we keep it going. If nothing else, it gives me something to boast about. Work that fragile ego.
And Tuesday morning was setting up to be a replay of so many other mornings. Few surprises. My Swan sleeping alone at the edge of the cove. My Spirit Bird, the cormorant, fishing solo. That’s a photo I took of her — her elegant curved neck, the matte black finish of her back, her gulping a breath before diving again.
I keep walking.
My camera goes back in the bag, and doesn’t leave the bag. Been here. Done that. Seen it before. Not worth the energy to pull it out of the sling.
I reach the Park and I approach the break wall. I’m looking out on Long Island Sound. It’s quiet this morning. Few walkers. Calm. No wind.
I re-grip my camera bag to hoist myself up on the break wall and at that moment a flock of ~20 Canada Geese lift off the water, and surge low over my head. Those in the back honking to encourage those up front to keep up their speed. It was one of those moments — the beat of 40 wings, the urgency of their calls. I’ll knew that I’d remember this. Write about this.
I keep walking.
I’m thinking about why that moment was a moment. I was startled…a break of the silence. An interruption of the thoughts banging around in my head. A piercing of the quiet, almost to say: Awaken Man. Look around you.
I keep walking.
I see another Cormorant feeding. 2 Spirit Birds in one Day. Now that’s Something. I take my camera out of my bag and snap a few shots.
I keep walking.
I notice another flock across the pond, but its not Geese. Smaller, darker, flying lower, wings flapping with greater urgency.
I stop to watch.
I swing my sling around to grab the zoom lens. Heart beating. Come on Dave. Come on.
It was another Moment.
They were too far out even with the zoom.
I turned to walk back to the Park to see if I could get a better shot.
Hand shake. No time for tripod. No time to adjust camera settings. Blurry! It will be blurry!
25? 50? More?
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)
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
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:
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…]
“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
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:
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
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:
