Flying West. Up, and Back.

Adriane Ayme

Like Kafka in his Letters to Milena, I’m trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.

Yet, I will try, and yes, here it is again. Deep in the marrow of those same bones.  It builds.

A sabbatical. From hands balled in fists, squeezing the reins, to ceding it all to a clean-cut pilot, his Aviator Hat tilted ever so slightly to the right: “Thank you Sir for flying with American.”

My head leans on the cool aluminum skin of the 450 ton albatross.  500 mph, and standing still. The only sign of Man, the long white breath of an earlier bird, and us, seven miles up.

Down, way down are the Badlands. The salt flats. The arid plains.  The snow capped peaks.

Earth.

The immensity of It.  The insignificance of Me.

It’s inexplicable. That soft pull.  The freeing of the twisted, braided cords.  Release. Continue reading “Flying West. Up, and Back.”

Lightly child, lightly.

Olafur-Eliasson-light

My God, a moment of bliss.

Why, isn’t that enough

for a whole lifetime?

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “White Nights,” 1848. White Nights and Other Stories The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Volume X.


Notes:

  • Quote: Thank you Vale of Soul-Making. Photo: Olafur Eliasson via Exercice de style
  • 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.”

 

Sunday Morning

georges-perec-quote

~ Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep


Source: Invisible Stories

 

Where is your bliss station?

sit-still-peace-quiet-solitude

[Sacred space] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen. […]

Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.

~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth


Credits: Quote – Brain Pickings. Photograph: HauntedBeautifully

When My Time Comes Around…