Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Well, I tell you, one thing I would say about your film is that, what would be really interesting for people to see, is how beautiful things grow out of shit. Because nobody ever believes that. You know, everybody thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head. They’d somehow appeared there and formed in his head. Before he, and all he had to do was write them down and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But I think what’s, what’s so interesting and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that that’s how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted, they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that, then you live a different kind of life, you know. You, you could have another kind of life where you can say, where you say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

— Brian Eno, “Beauty” (Track 5) in “Here Is What Is” (via )


Notes:

T.G.I.F.: Waking the pond for another day

On the far side of the pond, an egg-yolk sun rises out of the dense tree line like a hot air balloon, slow, graceful. It hovers, suspended for a moment, before breaking free of its tethers—the break of dawn. In that instant, the smallest breeze shirrs the water, waking the pond for another day.

Miranda Cowley Heller, The Paper Palace: A Novel (Riverhead Books, July 6, 2021)


Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Where would you begin?

Where would you end?

— Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways: A Novel (William Morrow (July 13, 2021)


Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call… I’m Up! Ta – Dah!


Photo: Bird is a Stilt. Stilt is a common name for several species of birds in the family Recurvirostridae, which also includes those known as avocets. They are found in brackish or saline wetlands in warm or hot climates. They have extremely long legs, hence the group name, and long thin bills (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

This is the time to be slow…
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.

~ John O’Donohue, in “To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings


Notes: Poem via MindfulBalance. Photo: “I am curious” by Olafur Eliasson (via thisisnthappiness)