SMWI*: Take me back
January 25, 2014 by 40 Comments
Breathless,
at the speed
this video took me back.
Saturday mornings in January.
Crisp, cold mountain air.
A sparkling layer of frost on the snow.
Running in Sorel boots to the outdoor rink,
Snow crunching under each foot fall.
Rushing to lace up our skates.
And we go.
And we go.
And we go.
If you close your eyes and listen
You can hear
The steel blades cutting the ice.
The chop, chop, chop of cross-overs to accelerate.
The spray of fine ice crystals from a hard stop.
Take me back.
To our Golden Pond.
This Canadian’s Heaven.
~ DK
- SMWI* = Saturday Morning Work-out Inspiration
- Credits: Video – Thank you Rob @ The Hammock Papers
keta / KAY-tah / n
January 3, 2014 by 18 Comments
keta /KAY-tah/
n. an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past.
You are immersed in the passage of time. Sometimes you can feel the current moving. Sometimes you forget it’s there, only to be reminded again, another in a series of passing moments. A moment is defined by its momentum. It keeps moving. We think of a memory as somehow dead. As a memorial, anchored in its own time and place. A half buried reminder of what was once here. You can’t just hang on to things. You have to let go. You have to move on. It’s hard to imagine that certain memories are still alive. Still fighting against the current. Struggling to keep up. That certain images still have the power to leap back into the present. So you look across the room at someone you know. Maybe they’re all grown up. Maybe they have children of their own. Maybe you’ve known them for 50 years. But in your eyes they are still the same goofy kid you once knew. It’s not just the moments that we remember. Not the grand gestures and catered ceremonies. Not the world we capture poised and smiling in photos. It’s the invisible things. In minutes. The cheap raw material of ordinary time. These are the images that will linger in your mind, moving back and forth. Still developing.
~ John Koenig
Source: Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
See more by John Koenig: Sunday Morning: Sonder
Christmas Tree?
December 23, 2013 by 54 Comments
There was some debate in our household over what I saw in this photograph. No, debate isn’t the right choice of words. I was mocked. What do you see here?
Image Credit
I win
December 11, 2013 by 26 Comments
It was cold.
A bone rattling winter morning.
Brother Rich and I are waiting for a ride to hockey practice.
We’re stomping our feet.
And banging our mitts trying to warm.
The hood of our green, ’55 GMC pick-up, is coated with frost.
A frosty floral design.
“I dare you to lick it.”
“You dare me to lick it?”
“Yes.”
“What do I get if I do?”
“You won’t do it.”
“I won’t do it?”
He grins.
Pudgy boy shoots his devilish grin.
I pause.
I wheel around,
And, lick it. [Read more…]
Do Over
December 4, 2013 by 28 Comments
British Columbia. 1970’s:
Mountain firs line the banks of the creek bed.
Shadflies, flit in from the shadows, and back out into the sun.
Mountain run-off, clear and pure, glistens, sparkles.
I’m standing knee deep.
I pick the line with my forefinger, click, cast and release.
The bait lands with a plop.
I start working the stream.
I’m Working it.
December. 2013.
Running. With Ferns.
November 17, 2013 by 27 Comments
We’d run.
Our sneakers dripping with mid morning dew.
Hearts pounding.
We’d reach the plateau.
And See.
Our eyes held in rapture.
Not just any Green. An ethereal magnificence.
In Spring, it was an unfurling of a carpet on the forest floor.
In Summer, the ferns rose.
They climbed, fed by hard, warm rains.
Knee-high under the cover of deciduous trees.
Chest-high in clearings.
Emitting an earthy fragrance, fresh and cooling, filling our lungs.
In Autumn, Green gave way to a harvest of Gold.
Tips of fiddleheads crumbling as we batted them with our hands in our climb.
Rising particles of fine dust in air behind us.
We’d reach the creek.
A trickle now.
We’d kneel down, the moss cushioning our knees.
Lips rushing to slurp the cool water.
Pausing to catch our breath.
And, then back.
Back down the mountainside.
Our footprints cutting shadows through the ferns.
Leaving their imprints etched in our consciousness.
It’s so close.
So close today, 40 years later.
Thousands of miles away.
I close my eyes,
My skin tingles from the coolness under the canopy.
The Canadian Cascades lingering in my nostrils.
There it is.
Right there.
The Sea of Green.
“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”
~ Luis Buñuel
Credits: Image Credit: Saicode via Sunforhersoul. Quote Source: Journal of a Nobody
Related Posts: Running Series.
Ears dragging the edge of the goldenrod
October 22, 2013 by 15 Comments
We’re in a field I used to love,
a redbone coonhound running ahead
her ears dragging the edges of the goldenrod
till they are tipped in pollen,
like twin paintbrushes dipped in gilt.
—Kate Daniels, from “Crowns,” in Five Points
Poem Source: A Poet Reflects. Thank you for the inspiration: James Stratford for the photograph and Ophelia Keys for her poem: Up to the Sweet Hill:
“…Up to the sweet hill where the bees sing and faithful animals place their heads upon our knees. There we’ll set the horses loose and stay forever. There let it rest. The sun, the gorgeous sky, and you and me.”
That old September feeling
September 25, 2013 by 13 Comments
“That old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air… Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
By one my favorite authors from one of my favorite books, the Pulitzer Prize Winning Angle of Repose.
Quote Source: Stalwart Reader. Find book on Amazon here.
