It’s impossible to be lonely
when you’re zesting an orange.
Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room
fills with fruit.
Look around: you have
more than enough. Always have.
You just didn’t notice
until now.
— Amy Schmidt, Abundance (in memory of Mary Oliver) (Rattle.com, January 20, 2019)
Notes
Remember when you would have been over-the-moon thrilled to have just a fraction of your life as it is now?
Look around you: it is enough.
KEEP MOVING
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (Atria/One Signal Publishers, October 6, 2020)
Photo: Daybreak. December 15, 2020. 6:39 to 7:09 am. 29° F. Feels like 23° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford CT
There’s a lightness in things.
Only we people move forever burdened,
pressing ourselves onto everything, obsessed by weight.
How strange and devouring our ways must seem
to those for whom life is enough.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, “Part Two XIV,” from Sonnets to Orpheus
Notes:
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.
~David Whyte, “Enough” Where Many Rivers Meet
Notes: Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Vadim Stein via Mennyfox55
It isn’t enough.
I was gulping for air that never came. You know, graceless.
Until I let go.
~ Rolando Rios, Queen of the South (S2:E:1)
Notes:
There isn’t enough of anything
as long as we live.
But at intervals
a sweetness appears and,
given a chance,
prevails.
~ Raymond Carver, from “The Author of Her Misfortune” in “All of Us: The Collected Poems”
Notes:
I am not a person to say the words out loud
I think them strongly, or let them hunger from the page:
know it from there, from my silence, from somewhere other
than my tongue
the quiet love
the silent rage
— Keri Hulme, from “Against the Small Evil Voices,” in Strands.
Notes:
Maybe it would be better
to let out a gentle sigh
at the transience of the world
and carry on.
~ Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
Notes:
When I tell you how bad it is,
how hard I’ve worked at something,
how much I’ve been through,
there is only one phrase I want to hear.
Which is:
‘That’s enough. You can stop now.’
~ Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
Notes:
A: Just no good.
Q: Huh?
A: I just was no good.
Q: Elaborate please.
A: Starter pistol fires at 2:30 am. Sprinter explodes out of the blocks. 4 consecutive mornings.
Q: Outcome?
A: Dominos.
Q: Dominos?
A: Dominos, tip, tip, tipping, toppling in slow motion, and then roaring around corners and racing down straightaways at mid-day.
Q: Dominos?
A: Dominos.
A: Bad Ju-Ju. Darth Vader.
Q: Martyr kneeling to the God of Work?
A: Hmmmmmm. [Read more…]
6:14 am. 28° F. Friday morning.
You push the start button, the engine fires. The heater begins to blow. The wipers clear the morning dew. The transmission slides into reverse. Sirius beams down from the satellite circling, silently, way above. You turn the dial and it’s Seals & Crofts. “Summer Breeze” fills the cabin and you mouth “makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind.” It fills you like Guskin’s current of heat running through your body, as if you’ve swum into a warm patch in a cold lake. Your eyes scan the traffic in the right lanes, orderly, flowing. They shift to the horizon, the sunrise burns amber into the light cloud cover.
And there it comes. Heart-side. A morning rush of sorts. The cables affixed to the poles – a mild current jumps and sparks, stops and starts up again. This continues for two to three minutes, a morning call in recent weeks. This intermittent squeeze, a crack in the earth, the bedrock shivers. [Read more…]
Thursday night ride home, up I-95 N on dry roads and heavy traffic.
My right hand rests on the dial.
So, DK, what’s it gonna be?
Radio, with its 50+ stations?
Sirius, with its 100 channels?
iPhone playlists, with 5437 tunes?
Or, Pandora streaming, with its infinite candy?
So much candy, yet never satisfied, yearning for the familiar grooves.
McEwen answers in World Enough & Time: “Intake, for example: how much is enough?”
And Simon Reynolds follows: “Complaining that there’s too much good art and entertainment being made at the moment seems churlish — how could that be a problem? Yet it’s undeniable that there is something curiously oppressive about the current bounty, something paralyzing about our ease of access to it. keeping up with what’s good gets to seem like a chore. If anything, the overload in music feels even more unmanageable.”
And in flows nostalgia. An ache… [Read more…]
Seen enough
[…]
Had enough
[…]
Enough
[…]
— Arthur Rimbaud, Departure. Selected Poems & Letters
Notes:
Inspired by:
I’ll tell you what love of this life is.
It’s looking up
through trees newly bare of leaves
and seeing there the oldest road,
a broken line of white stars
stretching out across the sky.
It’s thinking,
this could be enough.– Susan Elbe, Light Made From Nothing
Credits: Little Duck Comic Adapted from Poorly Drawn Lines. Susan Elbe quote: Whiskey River
Remembering
And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is –
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.
In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.
And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Wiki Bio for Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Credits: Image by Stephan Vanfleteren. Poem: Thank you Whiskey River.
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