Tag: Body

I am a man made of rain.

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rain-raining-water-black-and-white

I could grumble about the rain and the discomfort, but after all, rain affirms what this country is. Today I stand face to face with the maker of it all, the source of its beauty and abundance, and I love the rain as desert people love the sun. I remember that the human body is ninety-eight percent water, and so, more than anything else, rain is the source of my own existence. I imagine myself transformed back to the rain from which I came. My hair is a wispy, wind-torn cloud. My eyes are rainwater ponds, glistening with tears. My mind is sometimes a clear pool, sometimes an impenetrable bank of fog. My heart is a thunderstorm, shot through with lightning and noise, pumping the flood of rainwater that surges inside my veins. My breath is the misty wind, whispering and soft one moment, laughing and raucous another. I am a man made of rain.

~ Richard Nelson, The Island Within

Photo: Journal of a Nobody

Luminous

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woman, portrait,hands,listen

Q: “The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.” What do you mean by that?

RP: You start the song, it has a pulse, three-quarter time, one hundred and twenty beats per minute, and you know, even as you round the corner of the first verse, that it’s only going to last for four and a half minutes. All you can do is keep moving to it. When the beat stops, you are aware of having had that beat moving through you, and moving you, and you are aware of the ephemerality of your own existence, the fragility of your own body, the fact that your body is already becoming something else.

~ Richard Powers, In an Interview in The Paris Review

And, this tune, for me, does exactly that…

↓ click for audio (Max Richter– “Luminous”)

Credit: Photograph – Daniel Lehenbauer

It will hush if you give it an egg

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egg-over-easy

“It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.” Wallace Stevens wrote that, and in the long run he was right. The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

~ Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse. Teaching a Stone to Talk

Image: Photobucket

SMWI*: Come on Ursula. Nobody believes that. No pain…

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black-cat

Perfection is “lean” and “taut” and “hard” — like a boy athlete of twenty, a girl gymnast of twelve. What kind of body is that for a man of fifty or a woman of any age? “Perfect”? What’s perfect? A black cat on a white cushion, a white cat on a black one … A soft brown woman in a flowery dress… There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.

~ Ursula Le Guin, on dieters and exercisers in Ursula K. Le Guin – On Aging and What Beauty Really Means

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Body Caligraphy

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