Tag: dark

Lightly Child, Lightly. (The Darkness Around Us is Deep)

Live & Learn10 Comments

Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go. I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again.

— William Stafford, from “Remembering” in The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems.

Notes:

  • Poem Source: Thank you Beth via Alive on All Channels
  • Photo: DK 4:45am this morning at Cove Island Park. For more photos from this morning, click here.
  • Thursday Posts inspired by Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child. Lightly.

Live & Learn33 Comments

A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy…our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise.

As about the distant, so about the future. It is very dark: but there’s usually light enough for the next step or so.

— C.S. Lewis, from a letter to Bede Griffiths, December 20, 1944, in “Yours, Jack. Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis” (HarperCollins, 2008)

Notes:

  • Thank you Kurt @ Cultural Offering via tail-feathers
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

So let the darkness shape you, let it reform you, let it cradle you…

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Notes:

  • DK Photo: 5:45 a.m. 54° F. Monday, October 3, 2022 @ Sconset Beach, Nantucket, MA. Remnants of Hurricane Ian. Wind Gusts up to 35 mph. See more photos from yesterday’s morning walk here.
  • Post inspired by: “It is only when we are truly alone, without someone else to lean on, left with our own inner solitude that we can undergo a process of change. The introspection that is needed to bring out the light that has dwindled down to ash and reignite the fire of our being. So let the darkness shape you, let it reform you, let it cradle you and birth you into a new life. Let the spark flame again, in the darkness is where you will find it.” —  L.J. Vanier, Ether: Into the Nemesis (via Make Believe Boutique)

Lightly Child, Lightly

Live & Learn34 Comments

 

I wish, for the me I was then, that I could add one more flash, much further forward. I wish that the me nodding out in a cold cinderblock cell could see ahead five years, or even ten… I wish she could see who she will become, and the parts of herself she will leave behind. The darkness that she will learn to live with, and the light she will learn to let in.

— Keri Blakinger, random excerpts from Corrections in Ink: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press, June 7, 2022)

Notes:

  • See prior post on Blakinger’s new book, here.
  • Book Review by David Sheff in NY Times: A Harrowing Journey From Cornell to Addiction to Prison
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn17 Comments

What I want is the other world in this world. What I want is the way up and the way down, the way in and the way out. What I want is the poem that rears up like a mythic creature from the dark place of origins, only to transform into the holy, unrepeatable faces of the living. What I want is the mythic wings still thrumming inside them.

—  Joseph Fasano, from “Supernovae and Dark Stars: Some Notes on Universality in the Lyric Poem,” American Poet (no. 50, Spring/Summer 2016)

Notes:

  • Photo: DK – Moon @ Daybreak. 6:18 a.m. Wednesday, October 20, 2021. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
  • Quote via Memory’s Landscape
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”