The sky is a soft blue and I begin the walk…winding down to the center of my everything.
— Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling: A Novel (Knopf, June 7, 2022)
Notes:
I think the trees are firework taxidermy.
A steady reminder of celebration and light.
How quiet. I’m a collaps-
ing house. Come collect me.
— Dalton Day, from “Stepping Out of Sorrow,” published in Souvenir: a Journal. Fall 2015
Notes:
Not really. Don’t know what Island it is.
DK @ Daybreak. 6:59 am, March 18, 2021. 32° F, feels like 21° F, wind gusts up to 36 mph. Rowayton Beach, Norwalk, CT
Daybreak. Snow. 6:40 am, February 19, 2021. 29° F, feels like 19° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
All gods are homemade,
and it is we who pull their strings,
and so,
give them the power to pull ours.
Notes: Quote Source. Photo: DK, Feb 5, 7:25 a.m. Cove Island Park.
277 consecutive mornings. My daybreak walk at Cove Island Park.
Ted tells Sylvia’s mother: “I try to keep her writing and drawing—the more she does, the more she can do, and the better she feels.”
—the more she does, the more she can do, and the better she feels.
Yes. Ted. Yes.
It’s a passage 463 pages into Heather Clark’s “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.” I’m not sure why Kiki, but I persist. I keep turning the pages. Soot, and all.
Hughes continues…
And the sky
Was vast gulfs of blue, and the air
Lifted us like alcohol
Not blue today Ted. Not blue.
But vast gulfs of sherbets, pinks, mauves, oranges, and everything but, Blue.
And lift it did…
Notes:
It made me calm to cut things out.
— Susan Burton, Empty: A Memoir (Random House, June 23, 2020)
Photo: Daybreak. 5:26 am. July 24, 2020. 74° F. Weed Ave & Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
Someone’s life,
their attainments
(forgetting that nine-tenths of it is lived on the inside)…
~ A. K. Benjamin, Let Me Not Be Mad: My Story of Unraveling Mind (Dutton, June 11, 2019)
Photo by Jamie Schafer via (aberrant beauty). Related Posts: It’s been a long day
I stop and let myself lean
a moment against the blue
shoulder of the air.
~Alison Luterman, from Invisible Work
Notes: Photo: lello d’anna with Blue (Erchie, Campania, Italy). Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
I remember how [the sparrow] felt
When I got my hand, and how it burst
that hand open
when I took it outside, a strength
that must have come out of hopelessness
and the sudden light
and the trees…
— Stephen Dunn, from “The Sudden Light and the Trees,” in Landscape at the End of the Century
Notes:
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me – a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic – or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
~Denise Levertov, “Variations on a Theme By Rilke” in “Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Engagement”
Notes:
In recent months I have become intent on seizing happiness:
to this end I applied various shades of blue…
I am trying to invent a new way of moving under my dress…
yet the thigh keeps quiet under nylon…
draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins
nightly toward its brightness and we are on it.
~ Carolyn “C.D.” Wright, from “Crescent,” Tremble: Poems
Notes:
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world,
blue vapor without end.
~ Lisel Mueller, from “Monet Refuses the Operation” in Second Language
Notes: Photo: Blue Ridge Mountains by Richard Terpolilli. Poem: Poetry Foundation
I’d go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I’d look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness.
And then I’d just feel a prayer.
~ L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Notes:
2006. July. (I think.) Barcelona. I’m sitting in a conference room in the basement level of an aging hotel. You know the hotel – the one where all of the investment was poured into the lobby, and you don’t need to search to find disappointment, it finds you, at every turn. This Barcelona could have been anywhere – a Days Inn within a cab ride of O’Hare in Chicago, or a budget hotel in Newark, or a refurbished hotel in downtown Philadelphia serving small, short tenor business meetings. Yet, it wasn’t. The room was windowless, the walls were free of art. There was dim overhead lighting, the florescent tubes emitting a low sizzle. There was a whiff of fresh blue paint, cheap plastic surgery fooling no one. Beneath its blue skin, the bones of the room emit traces of hand rolled tobacco from 50 years ago. It’s an hour after the working lunch, Hour Six of a day long meeting, and stupor is settling in. There was no audio visual equipment. There were no extra notepads or pens. There was no coffee. No bottled water. In the center of the table, stood a one quart jug, fingerprints visible on its belly, and a slice of lemon, not dressed in its distinctive canary yellow, but a dull yellow mustard clinging to the wall of the jug as if it were licked and pressed like a postage stamp, desperately seeking escape. The jug sweats, the air is thick, the overhead aluminum ducts rattle with the firing and re-firing of the AC system that was built for a building half the size. Hard back chairs surround the table and line the walls, with the butt cheeks of thousands of prior occupants having grooved and flattened the frayed cushions. Butt to cushion to metal, do-over and over and over. I can see the blue palette. I can smell the decaying Gyprock. I can feel the heaviness of the air. Yet, I can’t extract a single shred of why I was there and what was accomplished, not on this day, not on Day 2 which ran ten hours. The Blue Room returns and returns and returns and returns. The question is: Why?
~ DK
Notes:
David Hockney was way ahead of today’s ubiquitous selfies. In the 1980s—already famous for his painted landscapes of California pools and suburban houses—he threw himself into drawn, painted and photographed self-portraits…
At first the Hockney self-portraits showed vulnerability and self-consciousness, according to Dr. Brooks. But over the years, he adds, they showed intense self-examination. Mr. Hockney has depicted himself with his mouth wide open in surprise, with a scowl or with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth at an angle.
The results, as well as Mr. Hockney’s wider interest in photographic collage, are the main focus of “Happy Birthday, Mr. Hockney,” a celebration of his turning 80 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, opening in two stages, June 27 and July 18. Most of the versions of Mr. Hockney on view, though, don’t make for a cheery celebration. “I usually only draw myself in down periods,” Mr. Hockney told London’s Telegraph newspaper in 2001. “I suppose that’s why I often draw myself looking grim. I just think, ‘Let’s have a look in the mirror.’ When you are alone and you look in a mirror you never put on a pleasing smile. Well, you don’t, do you?”
~ Alexandra Wolfe, from Self-Portraits and Photos for David Hockney Birthday (wsj.com, June 23, 2017)
Notes:
Today, if you’re confronting an issue for the ten thousandth time, or feeling that your life is going nowhere, or panicking over how little you’ve achieved, stop and breathe. You’re not falling behind on some linear race through time. You’re walking the labyrinth of life. Yes, you’re meant to move forward, but almost never in a straight line.
~ Martha Beck, from The Labyrinth of Life
Notes:
Singer Céline Dion is cutting the price of her Florida estate to $38.5 million. See the 19 other amazing pictures here: Celine Dion Jupiter Estate.
Live & Learn 