Czesław Miłosz – Live & Learn

Monday Afternoon Wake-Up Call

October 24, 2022 by Live & Learn 24 Comments

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

— Czeslaw Milosz, “Gift” from New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001( Ecco; April 4, 2017)

DK Photo @ 6:15am on October 23, 2022. More photos from yesterday’s morning walk at Cove Island Park here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Czesław Miłosz, envy, Gratitude, Happy, Peace, Photography, Poem, Poetry

Walking in place. Saturday Morning.

November 3, 2018 by Live & Learn 49 Comments

“I like things I can see as much as things I can’t (see)…that inner light was drawing me in.”

It was an innocuous line by Murakami in Killing Commendatore, but for some reason I couldn’t, I can’t, let it go.

And then it’s Baader-Meinhof. You are shopping for a new car, you fall in love with a particular model, and then suddenly you begin to see it everywhere. But the what is what I can’t see.

Murakami is followed by a passage I read by Immanuel Kant:

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”

And it’s early Saturday morning. Light rain.

I’m in bed, it’s dark out. The body is spent from the week. The Mind is off on its own, its finger tips touching, exploring, wandering, free, weightless. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Inspire, Photography, Poetry, Quotes Tagged With: Czesław Miłosz, Gratitude, Haruki Murakami, immanuel kant, Inspirational, Mind, Photography, Poetry, Quotes, Rain, raining, Story, sublime, thoughts

It’s been a long day

April 27, 2017 by Live & Learn 14 Comments

Endurance comes only from enduring.
With a flick of the wrist I fashioned an invisible rope,
And climbed it and it held me.

— Czeslaw Milosz, from a “A Magic Mountain” in New and Collected Poems (1931-2001)

Notes:

Photo: Rope by A Palindrome. Poem: An Itinerant Poet
Related Posts: It’s been a long day and Kyo Maclear

Filed Under: Inspire, Photography, Poetry, Quotes Tagged With: belief, Czesław Miłosz, endurance, endure, Hope, Inspirational, long day, persevere, Photography, Poem, Quote, rope, struggle, Work

In there is the question

August 1, 2014 by Live & Learn 15 Comments

Do you know how it is
when one wakes at night suddenly
and asks, listening to the pounding heart:
what more do you want,
insatiable?

— Czeslaw Milosz, from Farewell

Credits: Poem – Thank you Schonweider. Photograph: Lost in Vogue

Filed Under: Art, Inspire, Lit, Photography, Poetry, Quotes Tagged With: Black and White, Czesław Miłosz, heart, insatiable, insomnia, Inspirational, Photography, Poem, Poetry, seek, Sleep, want, yearn

Early we receive the call

July 27, 2014 by Live & Learn 12 Comments

The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird’s-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what we have or have not done: this is life as a landscape, or life as resume. But life is incremental, and though a worthwhile life is a gathering together of all that one is, good and bad, successful and not, the paradox is that we can never really see this one that all of our increments (and decrements, I suppose) add up to. “Early we receive a call,” writes Czeslaw Milosz, “yet it remains incomprehensible, / and only late do we discover how obedient we were.”