I can't sleep…
What happens every day is what’s surprising. The treasure’s never where I look to find it but where I simply look — the sky, the wind, sunrise, a silver arc, the moment’s chance.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “The Everyday (At Kishamish)” in “Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems”
Feather blowing in the wind. Twilight. 5:52 am. April 17, 2024. Cove Island Park. Stamford, CT.
More photos from this morning’s walk here.
Q: How is the goodness of God manifested even in the clothing of birds and beasts?
A: Small birds, which are the most delicate, have more feathers than those that are hardier. Beasts that live in the icy regions have thicker, coarser coats than those that dwell in the tropical heat.
~ Jenny Offill, Weather: A Novel (Knopf, February 11, 2020)
Photo: European Starling by Ostdrossel
An owl’s feathers are silent in flight because individual barbs zipper shut so no air can rush through like the sound of desert wind. Each time I find a feather, I brush its webbing like velvet against my cheek. Sometimes, I close my eyes and fan the air by my ear. I hear nothing, only feel a slight breeze.
~ Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays of Undoing (October 8, 2019)
Photo: Burrowing Owl by Kevin Juberg (via Voice of Nature)
Most decisions are based on a tiny difference.
People say, ‘This was right, that was wrong’; the difference was a feather.
I keep scales wherever I am to remind me of that. They’re a symbol of my awareness. Of the distortion most people have of what is better and what is not.
~ Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Sarah Crichton Books, October 8, 2019)
There are things that happen in the world that have an effect out of proportion to their apparent importance. It is as if there were always blowing a faint, supernatural wind through the world, holding a secret of assuagement for troubled hearts, that is only perceptible when it can find a straw, a feather, a gossamer-seed, a leaf, in the débris of circumstance light enough for it to stir.
~ John Cowper Powys, Weymouth Sands
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