Notes:
Unselfing
April 24, 2022 by 15 Comments
Beauty, (Iris) Murdoch argues, gave us an opportunity for an “unselfing.” She writes:
I am looking out my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.
— Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty: A Memoir (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, April 5, 2022)
Notes:
- Kestrel. Cardinal. Same. Shot taken of Red Cardinal overhead this morning @ 8 am in backyard.
- Photos from Daybreak walk this morning here.
It hums, it throbs, it improvises. So many voices. Only one song.
June 15, 2019 by 26 Comments
A cardinal, the very essence of red, stabs
the hedgerow with his piercing notes;
a chickadee adds three short beats,
part of the percussion section, and a white-
throated sparrow moves the melody along…
And today, the sun, waiting for its cue,
comes out from the clouds for a short sweet
solo, then sits back down, rests between turns.
On the other side of the world, night’s black
bass fiddle rosins its bow, draws it over
the strings, resonates with the breath
of sleepers, animal, vegetable, human.
All the world breathes in, breathes out.
It hums, it throbs, it improvises. So many voices.
Only one song.
~ Barbara Crooker, from “One Song. After Rumi” in Line Dance
Photo credit: via your eyes blaze out. Poem: Beyond the Fields We Know
fireflies in the blood
March 4, 2016 by 7 Comments
Like the first time I ever saw a cardinal,
brilliant flash of red against the gray
of the English room, your voice clapped
against the windows;
signal: fireflies in the blood.
[…]
—Aracelis Girmay, “English Class” (for Anthony)
Credits: Poem – Who are you really, wanderer?. Photo: Delightful
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