Lightly Child, Lightly

Finally day breaks over things that I can’t predict, as I cannot predict myself. Only a stone, a celestial body, a fool can, sometimes, be predictable. Finally day breaks over a circumstantial, differentiated, risky, improbable world, as concrete, multicolored, unexpected, and, yes, beautiful as the one I see, feel, touch, admire.

Michel Serres, in Italo Calvino’s from “Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance” in “The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays. Translated by Ann Goldstein. (Mariner Books Classics, January 17, 2023) 


Notes:

  • Photo: Daybreak. 29° F, feels like 21° F.  6:00 to 7:00 am. March 16, 2023. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. See more photos from yesterday’s daybreak walk here.
  • 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.

the little things were everything


But after a couple of weeks of listing things I was grateful for, I came to see that the little things were everything. The little things were what I held on to at the end of the day. Single jokes that gave me the giggles. A beautiful flower arrangement, viewed through the window of a café. The fact that my cat came to cuddle me when she saw I was sad. These things gave me hope, pleasure, solace. Together, they added up to a fulfilling life. If a simple flower arrangement could make this world just a little more bearable, then perhaps my own small actions meant more than I was giving them credit for. Maybe when I made dinner, or listened to a friend rant, or complimented a woman on her incredible garden, I was helping make this world survivable for others. Perhaps that evening, when tallying up their own wins and losses for the day, someone would think of something I’d done and smile.

Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine Books, February 22, 2022)


Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Come back to earth…

dwell on the shortness of life.

Lift up your dark heart and sing a song about

how time drifts past you like the gentlest, almost imperceptible breeze.

Jim Harrison, from “Cold Poem” in “Saving Daylight.”


Note:

  • Photo: DK @ Daybreak. January 26, 2023. 6:35 a.m.
  • Poem: Thank you Whiskey River
  • 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.

Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

—  Mary Oliver, from “Am I Not Among The Early Risers” in West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (Mariner Books, April 7, 1998)


Notes:

  • Image Credit. Andreas Kuehn.
  • 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.”

 

Walking. A morning walk on a dreary day…

Here we are. Last day of 2022. I crawl out of bed, both knees are throbbing, why?   Doris Lessing: “But you just do not believe that you’re going to be old. People don’t realize how quickly they’re going to be old, either. Time goes very fast.” Truth Doris, truth.

970 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk to Cove Island Park. Like in a row. And it’s a dreary morning. Dreariness lines up with the morning news. Bombing strikes on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. More civilians dead. More civilians without power. It’s winter. It’s cold.

I walk.

I’m having to work to lift the camera off the shoulder. Blah…spoiled after a run of “money” sunrises this week.

I walk to the tip of the point, and stop to look out over the water. I stare at the bench, think about sitting down, and don’t. Body says yes, Mind refuses to walk over and sit. Will not do it.

A 2-man kayak comes round the corner, the most excitement I’ve seen this morning. I reach for the camera.

“Good morning” the man in the rear shouts. I let go of the camera. I reply in kind. [Read more…]

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts.

—  Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and The Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, September 16, 2013) (via acti-veg)

Sunday Morning

“In relationships, I’ve observed that a partner can start out as a friend, then become a passion, then a co-parent, a mother or a father of your children, and if you’re really fortunate, the partner remains—or returns as—a friend. It’s a lower-temperature take on a romantic life, but it’s enduring. I have been so fortunate. Great friendships can survive most of the crap thrown at them. They thrive on the manure of shared disappointment and drama. It’s hard to imagine a force as great as romantic love, but friendship comes close. Someone once argued that “friendship is higher than love,” and I understood what they meant. It may not be as melodramatic or grandiose or passionate as love, but friendship is often deeper and wider. Great friendships explain why we hold on to this life so tightly because it disappears so quickly. Just as Ali and I were becoming best friends, I was aware of the wider web of deep friendships we had both grown up in, this sacrament of friendship from the band to the community around us. Relationships we had chosen, not ones chosen for us by blood. Pandemics aside, I still embrace people when I meet them, which goes all the way back to the days of Shalom when that’s how we would say hello. I don’t know that I’ve ever shaken somebody’s hand without having to think about it. My instinct to hail a friend is to hold them.

— Bono, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono” (Knopf, November 1, 2022)


Photo: Bono portrait by John Hewson

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

I hadn’t done drugs since sniffing Lady Esquire shoe polish when I was fifteen. I didn’t need to. I felt the pinch of wonder. I felt everything sharply, the people we met, the sensation of being in a body, of eating or drinking. I knew there was darkness in the world, but I was sure it would not overpower us; rather, we would let ourselves be overpowered by the beauty of our discoveries as we traveled through this world. Railway stations and underground trains, the commons, a magnificent oak in a park, the redbrick Victorian buildings of England and Wales, the Georgian splendor of Edinburgh, of Glasgow with its occasional black eye. And the beautiful searching eyes of our audience. Every night, the show. The ragged and sometimes glorious show.

— Bono, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono” (Knopf, November 1, 2022)


Photo: via Zimbio

Saturday Morning

I’ve noticed that people love to hurry. Meals are always quick, coffees are never savoured, glances are fleeting, conversations brief and it feels like this is becoming normal, that people only expect surface level and they only strive for surface level in all aspects of life. Mediocre coffee. Luke-warm love. Convenience. Because life is scary and when you sit with it long enough, and really listen to the silence, you notice what you’re missing, and some of what we miss, we know we will never be able to find again.

—  Seyda Noir (seydanoirwords @ Instagram, April 28, 2022) (via balancedhuman)


Photo: Pixaby

Monday Afternoon Wake-Up Call

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.

A coloured cloud

As I wash the dishes I am filled with an invigorating emptiness and amuse myself with the soap bubbles. The water comes out of the tap with a rhythm that demands music. I accompany it with bursts of whistling and a phrase from a nondescript popular song. I play with the lather, which is like a cloud in which seasonal colours gleam then fade. I grasp the cloud in my hand and distribute it over the plates, glasses, cups, spoons and knives. It inflates as drops of water run over it. I scoop it up and make it fly through the air and it laughs at me, and my sense of having time to spare increases. My mind is blank, as indifferent as the noonday heat. But images of memories descend from afar and land in the bowl of water, neutral memories, neither painful nor joyful, such as a walk in a pine forest, or waiting for a bus in the rain, and I wash them as intently as if l had a literary crystal vase in my hands. When I am sure they’re not broken, they return safely to where they came from in the pine forest, and I remain here. I play with the soapy lather and forget what is absent. I look contentedly at my mind, as clear as the kitchen glass, and at my heart, as free of stains as a carefully washed plate. When feel completely sated with invigorating emptiness, I fill it with words of interest to nobody but me: these words!

Mahmoud Darwish, “A coloured cloud” in “A River Dies of Thirst


Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call – “Heaven”, I suggest. “Yup.”

Jeff Bridges at 72 wakes early and lingers a while in bed. Since a battle with lymphatic cancer that began two years ago (“When they found a 9in by 12in mass in my stomach”) and a bad case of Covid he contracted on his local chemo ward (“It made the cancer look like a piece of cake”), rising in the mornings has been a struggle for the veteran Hollywood actor. “I really have to drag myself out of bed,” he says. When Bridges is finally up and about, he stretches, he does a daily breathing exercise so intense it leaves him trembling, he makes coffee, he reads. By the time he’s down in the garage of his Santa Barbara home, maybe noodling about on a musical instrument, or painting, he’ll be feeling and behaving more like the Jeff Bridges that movie-goers have come to know: that beautifully unpolished, scruffy-sweet, growly-squeaky figure, irresistible in deathless works that include The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Big Lebowski and True Grit. […]

Bridges pats his chest, a where-was-I gesture. Oh yeah, positivity. “What I learned from that whole experience in hospital was: life is constantly giving us gifts. They may be gifts that we don’t think we want. Who wants cancer? Who wants fucking Covid, man? Well it turns out, I did. Because dealing with your mortality, it makes things more precious. It’s a gift, man, to realise that I’ve got eyes to look at all this beautiful stuff in the world. I can feel the temperature of the day on my skin. I’ve got a wife who loves me, my kids, too, and I can bathe in that love. It’s all a gift.”

Bridges was born to Lloyd and his wife Dorothy at the end of the 1940s, “right after they’d lost a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” he adds. “Can you imagine? Your one-year-old? But they had me. They got back in the saddle.” He wound up being the middle of three kids, his older brother Beau going on to become a successful film actor, his little sister Cindy an artist. “Our mom loved mothering,” Bridges remembers. “We all got to benefit. She did this thing with her kids called Time. It was an hour every day with each of us, doing whatever we wanted. Pretending to be clowns. Space monsters. You never got the feeling of duty coming from her. She just dug playing.” […]

At one point in our conversation, Bridges tries to recall a younger actor he worked with on the 2013 action- comedy R.I.P.D., only to blank on his name. He snaps his fingers, reaching for it. “I just watched his recent movie, Free Guy.” Ryan Reynolds? I suggest. “Yes!” Bridges exclaims, relieved, troubled as well by the lapse.

“Isn’t that terrible? That’s embarrassing. To forget someone’s name when they’re dear to you It’s awkward. It feels weird to me.” Bridges shakes his head and says: “Memory, man. As I get older I ask my brain for a name, a word, and it says, ‘Are you kidding?’ My brain is flipping me fingers.” I ask about his return to work on his new drama, The Old Man, whether he struggled to remember lines on set. Ian McKellen, a decade older than Bridges, but still in regular work, once told me that actors die twice. The first death comes when they stop being able to memorise their dialogue. “I was pleasantly surprised to find that was not the case on The Old Man,” Bridges says. “Maybe it’s a short-term, long-term memory thing?” […]

Before his mother died, she wrote Bridges a poem in which she described the “honour” of reaching advanced age. I ask him what he thinks she meant by the word. “It’s interesting. New shit comes up constantly as you get older. But it’s not like you’re learning new shit, it’s more like you’re practising how you respond to life. You kind of get to practise what you are.” Bridges continues, “People don’t talk too much about it, but often, in old age? You’ll be going through the things that age offers us – closer proximity to death, a whole different way of dealing with sex, hormonal shifts that make you look at intimacy in a different way – and it almost feels like going through adolescence again. Think of being young. Think of asking a girl out on a first date. Think of how that feels.” Bridges, touching his heart again, issues a high-trembling bleat to express how it feels, as love, terror and hope intermingle. “You have versions of that in old age, too.” […]

At the beginning of our conversation, Bridges talked me through his morning routine, those aching grouchy wake-ups before he stretches and breathes and makes coffee. Now he explains how each day ends for him and Sue. “We sit and we eat dinner in front of the TV. We’re always hooked on some new show or another. Maybe we’re getting tired, maybe I have a wrestle with one of the dogs on the carpet for a bit. I’ll say to Sue, ‘I’m goin’ up.’ And she says to me, ‘OK.’ I get into bed while she does her teeth. She comes in, too. We huddle with our dogs. We go to sleep.”

Heaven, I suggest.

“Yup,” says Bridges, nodding slowly in agreement. “Yup.”

— Tom Lamont, excerpts from “‘Dealing with your mortality, it makes things more precious’: Hollywood legend Jeff Bridges on the gift of life after cancer” (The Guardian, September 18, 2022)

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Your light does not come
from your successes.
Your light is not ignited
by perfection,
or achievement or body shape.
Your light is not fueled by
popularity or acceptance.
Neither is your light at any
risk of being put out,
when other lights around you,
are bright.
Your light is simply made of the
you-ness that makes you you,
the worries you have in the night,
the music which sparks your joy,
the books you had to read twice,
the memories stored safely
in your heart,
the people you love and the
people who love you.
Your light is never dependent
on how you look,
or how you perform.
It’s just there,
and it’s quite simply brilliant,
and it’s all yours.
And it lights up every room
you walk into,
whether you activate it or not.
What a wonderful thing.
Shine bright little fighter,
this dark world needs your glow.

~Donna Ashworth, “Your Light” in I Wish I Knew. Poems to Soothe Your Soul & Strengthen Your Spirit (Black & White Publishing, April 28, 2022)


Notes:

  • Poem: Thank you Make Believe Boutique
  • 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.”

 

Being born is like this…


Being born is like this:
The sunflowers slowly turn their corollas toward the sun.
The wheat is ripe.
The bread is eaten with sweetness.
My impulse connects to that of the roots of the trees.

—  Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star


Notes:

How the world turns. All the things, wonderful and ordinary, that we take for granted

Lots of journalists have Salman Rushdie stories. He likes to talk and he is generous with his time. When I interviewed him a few years ago, we had lunch together… What I remember most, though, isn’t what happened there, but the fact that when we were finished, Rushdie insisted he would rather walk with me to Pimlico underground than pile into a taxi.

I think I was surprised. One of my very first jobs as a young journalist involved attending an event where Rushdie, then still in hiding, was rumoured to be going to appear (memory tells me that he did, emerging from behind a curtain like a stage magician). But I was also amused. He didn’t – it was obvious – quite know the best way to the station and in his outsize puffer jacket he rather meekly followed me, looking about happily as he strolled. I’ve thought of those few stuccoed streets, and of him padding along them in the sunshine, seemingly without a care, every day since he was attacked. How the world turns. All the things, wonderful and ordinary, that we take for granted…

Reading is my oldest habit, which is just as well given that I’m one of the judges of this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. If ingesting so many books so quickly is exhilarating, it’s also, at moments, arduous; hopefully, my years of training are about to pay off.

I read as I water the garden and wait for the kettle to boil. I read on the bus and the tube and at every pedestrian crossing.

What thoughts occur as I pick up, and put down, each title? All I can tell you is that the difference between a good book and a great one is both inexplicably small and ineffably vast – and that a cartoon I saw the other day in which a man headed to his book group in full armour and carrying a sword made me shudder more than it made me smile.

Rachel Cooke, from “Walking with Salman Rushdie to a tube station now seems like a distant age” (The Guardian, August 20, 2022)


Notes:

  • Inspired by Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh: “A sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.”
  • Portrait: Salman Rushdie, Murdo MacLeod, The Guardian

this is a moment to remember

The older we get, the more rapidly time seems to move. This phenomenon has been well documented by psychologists and average humans alike, but it was only a couple of years ago that we had a physical explanation for our changing perception of time. In 2019, mechanical engineering professor Adrian Bejan presented a peer-reviewed argument based on the physics of neural signal processing. Bejan hypothesized that, over time, the rate at which we process visual information slows down, which makes time seem to speed up as we age.

This tracks. Time feels especially slippery for me lately. Days with a toddler are simultaneously long and short. And the weeks, months, and years of pandemic life have been increasingly hard to wrap my head around. As writer Christine Speer Lejune described it, “Some memories from these pandemic years are sharply vivid; others feel as hazy as an old film reel, more like impressions of having done things than memories of actually doing them. Almost all of them are untethered from anything like chronology, just bobbing around together in a two-year-old pandemic stew.”

Time passes. Things happen. Days drag on and weeks zoom past. Before I know it, six weeks have gone by, and I’m left wondering what I did with all that time.

Thankfully, I have photos to rely on. Even if no one else sees them but me, my family, and a few random friends. My phone is full of big and small moments, captured so I don’t forget them.

The vast majority of the photos I take these days are of my daughter. I document her dutifully for a multitude of reasons: because she’s cute, because she grows so quickly, and because I know she’ll have few, if any, memories from this time.

I also take photos of her because she loves seeing them. “Pick-urs?” she asks, pointing to my phone. “Yes, we can look at pictures,” I reply.

She snuggles up in the crook of my arm as we scroll through the same old set of images. “Paint!” she shouts, seeing herself trying out watercolors for the first time. “Mama!” she says, pointing to a photo of me posing for the camera. “Beep beep!” she cheers, pushing her hand against an imaginary wheel, as she spots an image of herself in the grocery cart that’s shaped like a car.

She’s seen these photos a hundred times, and still, they bring joy.

These photos bring me joy, too. As counterintuitive as it may seem, taking photos helps me to stay in the present—signaling that this is a moment to remember. (Turns out, science backs this up.) Afterwards, looking through those photographs reminds me how beautiful everyday life can be…

Katie Hawkins-Gaar, from “I Want to Remember” (My Sweet Dumb Brain, August 16, 2022.) A newsletter about facing life’s ups and downs, all while being kind to yourself. Katie Hawkins-Gaar was 31 when her husband, Jamie, collapsed while running a half-marathon and died in 2017. A year-and-a-half after Jamie’s death, Katie launched her newsletter, My Sweet Dumb Brain, all about the ups and downs of grief.)

T.G.I.F. Now. And Now. And Now.

Stony silence as we cross the bridge into Manhattan [Cove Island Park] and the streets [paths] begin slipping past. Every moment of your life brings you to the moment you’re experiencing now. And now. And now. I’ve never have been on the streets [paths] this early [many times], predawn, and the driver [DK] agrees that it’s eerie and perfect.

Jo Ann Beard, Festival Days (Little, Brown & Company, March 16, 2021) (DK-EDITED)


Photos: DK @ Daybreak. 5:04 & 5:15 am, August 5, 2022. 76° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. Other photos from this morning here (landscape) and here (swans).

 

 

33 years in prison. 2 decades in solitary. 1st day out.

After nearly 33 years in prison — and over two decades in solitary confinement — Jack Powers
embarks on the first day of his new life.  13 min video. But worth your time.

Link to NY Times video here.

Moved…


Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

“Why can’t people see the good things in front of them?”

“They think they have time for it later.”

List (2011) (via CinemaBravo)

Lightly Child, Lightly


The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound—
a small stone falling on a red leaf.

The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.

The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it, and now she thrives. …
Now is her time to thrive.

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.

—  Jane Kenyon, “Things” in “The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon: Poems


Notes:

  • Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 5 am. May 16, 2022. 61° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from that morning here.
  • 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.”
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