Tag: Gratitude

Why I Have Decided to Live (High School Student!)

~ Live & Learn ~ 32 Comments

Spoonfuls of moonlight. Cold air. Her knit blanket
tugging at my body to stay.
The fog resting on my shoulders, hugging me.
Summer rain through an open window.
Thunderstorms & how they change the world momentarily
unafraid, or even better, unaware of humans.
Because I left my country broken.
Because I saw the first reflection of myself in a candlelight vigil.
Because I was flickering.
Because we made promises.
Because I can keep trying & no one can stop me.
Peaches.
Stars.
Willow trees.
Acoustic music with a trembling voice.
The kinds of poems that give me shivers.
Trains to nowhere in particular.
Our sweat sweet bodies colliding on wet grass.
Her hands & the way they cradle my heart
as if holding something precious.
August night drives.
Singing along to “Riptide” & eating cherries out of buckets.
Because we promised to return.
To mend a broken thing.
How laughter colonizes the lungs.
To think of myself as something larger than myself.
Because I can love every small thing..

— Kyo Lee, “Why I Have Decided to Live.” (Washington Post Book Club, April 12 2024). Kyo Lee, a student at the Laurel Heights Secondary School in Waterloo, Ontario, won first place in the international High School Writing Contest sponsored by the nonprofit literary publisher Narrative.  Entrants responded to the prompt: “My note to the world.”

Listen to Kyo read her poem here.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

~ Live & Learn ~ 22 Comments

and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.

— Mary Oliver, from “Bone” in New and Selected Poems vol. Il (Beacon Press, April 15, 2007)

Notes:

  • DK Photo: 6:04 a.m. April 1, 2024 at where else, Cove Island Park. Don’t miss more photos from the magnificent BIG PINK morning walk on April 1st here.
  • Quote Source: PetaltexturedSkies

Walking Cove Island Park. 1407 Days & Counting. Like in a Row.

~ Live & Learn ~ 33 Comments

Yesterday was 1,407 consecutive (almost) mornings on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a Row.

So what’s significant about that?

Two events.

The first, Cara Denison, a Cove Island Park morning runner, took that shot of me yesterday as I was walking out on low tide. She shared this photo and others here and here. I dislike (put mildly) selfies and self-portraits, but this magnificent shot moved me —  just LOOK at the beauty of the ground that I walk.

The second event was Lori sharing a passage (see below) from the dailyood.org titled “A Spiritually Literate Photographer” by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. This is an excerpt from their book: Spiritual Literature: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life.  The words speak for themselves and also touched me at my core. Thank you Lori for sharing.

Finally, as I sit here this morning preparing for my daybreak walk, making it 1,408 consecutive (almost) mornings, like in a row, I am flooded with gratitude for all of you that join me on my morning walks and musings, and so grateful for those of you who have become a part of this wonderful virtual community that I can’t live without —  it’s been 13 years here on this Page and we ain’t done yet.

Thank you, and Read on…

Continue reading “Walking Cove Island Park. 1407 Days & Counting. Like in a Row.” →

Fifty years of sun and water. That is the price.

~ Live & Learn ~ 28 Comments

“In the dream, a man had cut down our fifty-year-old pistachio tree, Leila’s and my tree. In the dream, we had a pistachio tree. Fifty years old. That alone.

And so we were deciding what to do with this man, what his just punishment should be. I said something stupid about him owing us a year’s pistachio harvest, the cost of the tree. And then Leila said, in English:

“I do not care about the pistachios, Roya jaan. I do not care about the tree. He owes us the fifty years of sun, fifty years of water inside that tree. Fifty years of sun and water. That is the price.”

She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.”

— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)

Notes:

  1. This man can write! Highly recommended.
  2. Amazon January, 2024 Book of the Month
  3. Book Review by Junot Diaz, NY Times, January 19, 2024: “A Death-Haunted First Novel Incandescent With Life. In “Martyr!,” the poet Kaveh Akbar turns a grieving young man’s search for meaning into a piercing family saga.
  4. Portrait Credit

Lightly Child, Lightly.

~ Live & Learn ~ 35 Comments

 

“Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?

And then, if the girl herself was rubbled by an errant mortar shell, her eyes full of tears and aimed in their final living moment at that flower, which would weigh more on the cosmic scales: a tear of gratitude at the great beauty of a flower lifting through ash, or a tear of delirious rage?

It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life. Even the platitudes offered after a tragedy—a divorce, a dead pet—seemed built around the expectation that gratitude was a base level to which you returned after passing through some requisite interval of grief: “In time, you’ll remember only the joy.” People really said that, people who, like Cyrus, could reasonably expect that sufficient training of the spirit would reveal a near-infinite supply of gratitudes hidden in every leaf and sound and mortarless sky.”

— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)

Notes:

  1. 1/3 of the way through this masterpiece. This man can write! Highly recommended.
  2. Amazon January, 2024 Book of the Month
  3. Book Review by Junot Diaz, NY Times, January 19, 2024: “A Death-Haunted First Novel Incandescent With Life. In “Martyr!,” the poet Kaveh Akbar turns a grieving young man’s search for meaning into a piercing family saga.
  4. Portrait Credit
  5. 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.