I can't sleep…
[…]
But remember that you have to move on,
somehow.
You just pick your head up
and stare at something beautiful
like the sky or the ocean,
and
you move the hell on.
— James Patterson, Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas.
Notes:
NOW and AGAIN the earth begins to desire rest. And in the weeks of autumn especially it shows its disposition to calm, to what feels like a stasis, a pause. The ocean retains its warmth, while high white cloud-boats ride out of the west. Now the birds of the woods are often quiet, but on the shore, the migrating sanderlings and plovers are many and vocal, rafts of terns with the year’s young among them come with the incoming tides, and plunge into the waves, and rise with silver leaves in their beaks. One can almost see the pulsing of their hearts, vigorous and tiny in the trim of white feathers. Where I live, on the harbor edge of the Cape’s last town, perfect strangers walking along the beach turn and say to each other, without embarrassment or hesitation: isn’t it beautiful.
~ Mary Oliver, Where I Live from Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
Notes:
Christie D’Zurill, LA Times: Sandra Bullock is People’s most beautiful woman; ‘ridiculous,’ she says:
Sandra Bullock, mother of Louis and winner of Oscar, is People magazine’s most beautiful woman for 2015…
At 50, she’s the oldest celebrity to be featured on the magazine’s annual cover celebrating beauty — a factoid that likely wouldn’t register with her 5-year-old son.
“[H]e asked why I have wrinkles, and I said, ‘Well, I hope some of them are from laughing so much.’ And he touched my face and said, ‘You’re not old, you’re just happy…“Real beauty is quiet,” she said. “Especially in this town, it’s just so hard not to say, ‘Oh, I need to look like that.’
“No, be a good person, be a good mom, do a good job with the lunch, let someone cut in front of you who looks like they’re in a bigger hurry.”…
I was 14 at the time. It was an cool evening in Moscow as we entered the famed Bolshoi Theatre. The performance was Swan Lake. It was a full house. Other memories? My disinterest. My restlessness. The tall, soft ice cream cones at the intermission. I remember Nothing. I missed Everything.
Notes:
By the toe of my boot,
a pebble of quartz,
one drop of the earth’s milk,
dirty and cold.
I held it to the light
and could almost see through it
into the grand explanation.
Put it back, something told me,
put it back and keep walking.
~ Ted Kooser, “On the Road.” Delights & Shadows