Dew evaporates
And all our world is dew…so dear,
So fresh, so fleeting.
~ Issa, 1763 – 1828, on the death of his child
Notes:
- Haiku: Thank you Karl @ Mindfulbalance.
- Photo: “Thousand drops of light” by Arindam Sen (via dragonfly)
So fresh, so fleeting
September 25, 2016 by 17 Comments
Sunday Morning
September 11, 2016 by 25 Comments
Once we get the human part down, “stop slamming doors” and start loving rocks…
Get the ordinary human thing down, and you will have all the spirituality that you can handle.
– Richard Rohr, Adapted from Contemplation in Action
Notes: Quote – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: “Isaac” by Natalya Karavay
Pirr, a light breath of wind, a cat’s paw on water
September 1, 2016 by 27 Comments
This is a book about the power of language – strong style, single words – to shape our sense of place. […]
The ten following chapters explore writing so fierce in its focus that it can change the vision of its readers for good in both senses. […] A book that brilliantly shows how such seeing might occur in language, written as it is in prose that has ‘the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree’. And for over a decade I have been collecting place words as I have found them gleaned singly from conversations, correspondences or books, and jotted down in journals or on slips of paper. […]
Many of these terms have mingled oddness and familiarity in the manner that Freud calls uncanny: peculiar in their particularity, but recognizable in that they name something conceivable, if not instantly locatable. Ammil is a Devon term for the fine film of silver ice that coats leaves, twigs and grass when freeze follows thaw, a beautifully exact word for a fugitive phenomenon I have several times seen but never before been able to name. Shetlandic has a word, af’ rug, for the ‘reflex of a wave after it has struck the shore’; another, pirr, meaning ‘a light breath of wind, such as will make a cat’s paw on the water’; and another, klett, for a ‘a low-lying earth-fast rock on the seashore’. On Exmoor, zwer is the onomatopoeic term for the sound made by a covey of partridges taking flight. […]
There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo – or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, ‘Wow.’
~ Robert Macfarlane, from Chapter 1: “The Word-Hoard” in Landmarks
Note: Portrait – Wharfedaleobserver
Miracle. All of it.
August 28, 2016 by 31 Comments
Each hair on your head is replaced every 2 to 7 years
A hundred hairs fall out every day and new ones grow back in their place
And look at your fingernails – they’re completely new every six months or so
The lining of your stomach and intestines
gets pretty beat up — it’s constantly exposed to acid and bile
and so those cells get replaced every few days
Every few weeks, your outer layer of skin is completely renewed
Every four months you have a fresh army of red blood cells
A hundred million new cells are born every minute and a hundred million old cells are destroyed
It’s actually the breakdown products of these red blood cells that turn your bruises and urine yellow
Every 10 years, you’ve got a new skeleton
a special team of cells breaks down old bone
and another builds new bone
Every 15 years your muscles are refreshed
You might think you gain and lose fat cells when you gain and lose weight
but the actually just get bigger and smaller
Over the course of 25 years though, most of them turn over
But there are a few things that stick around for your entire life
About half of your heart stays with you from birth to death because those cells
are replaced very slowly
Certain parts of your brain add a few new neurons over the course of your life
but the vast majority of your neurons developed before you were born
It’s the connections between those neurons — the circuits that store memories —
that are constantly changing
And there’s one more part of you that lasts your whole life (your eyes)
Months before you were born,
little cluster of cells stretched and filled themselves with transparent protein
As you grew, even after birth, more and more fibers were added, but that center endured
This is your lens the window through which you are watching this video right now
and its core has remained the same since the moment you first opened your eyes
~ Adam Cole and Ryan Kellman, excerpts from Your Body’s Real Age
Notes:
- Photo: Bang Sang Hyeok #305 (via Precious Things)
- Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
Lightly child, lightly.
August 25, 2016 by 27 Comments
I may become, in time, slightly more eccentric all the time. I may begin to wear outlandish hats, feathered and sequinned and rosetted, …. And all the kids will laugh, and I’ll laugh, too, in time. I will be light and straight as any feather. The wind will bear me, and I will drift and settle, and drift and settle. Anything may happen, where I’m going.
– Margaret Laurence, A Jest of God
Notes:
- Photo: Mike Pants (don’t miss the other shots)
- Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect 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.”
If you had to pick just one thing?
August 23, 2016 by 30 Comments
People ask me all the time what the secret to happiness is. “If you had to pick just one thing,” they wonder, “what would be the most important thing for leading a happy life?”
Ten years ago, I would have told you a regular gratitude practice was the most important thing—and while that is still my favorite instant happiness booster, my answer has changed. I believe the most important thing for happiness is living truthfully. Here’s the specific advice I recently gave my kids:
Live with total integrity. Be transparent, honest, and authentic. Do not ever waiver from this; white lies and false smiles quickly snowball into a life lived out of alignment. It is better to be yourself and risk having people not like you than to suffer the stress and tension that comes from pretending to be someone you’re not, or professing to like something that you don’t. I promise you: Pretending will rob you of joy.
I’ve spent the better part of my life as a people-pleaser, trying to meet other people’s expectations, trying to keep everyone happy and liking me. But when we are trying to please others, we are usually out of sync with our own wants and needs. It’s not that it’s bad to be thinking of others. It’s that pleasing others is not the same as helping others.
~ Christine Carter, Ph.D.
Don’t miss the rest of her great post here: Why It Doesn’t Pay to be a People Pleaser
Notes:
- Christine Carter Bio here.
- Carter is a Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center. She is the author of The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work (Ballantine Books, 2015) and Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents
- Photo Credit: Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau
He went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying
August 21, 2016 by 43 Comments
It was only many years after, when my grandfather had departed from this world and I was a grown man, I finally came to realise that my grandmother, after all, also believed in dreams. There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: “The world is so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die”. She didn’t say she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty revealed. She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn’t see them again.
~ Jose Saramago, (1922-2010), excerpt from his Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1998
Notes:
- Quote Source: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: The Guardian
- My favorite books including Saramago’s Blindness: Book, Books, Books
Running. And, slow sailing to a quiet dance.
August 20, 2016 by 33 Comments
It’s a coincidence. (Again?)
It’s synchronicity. (Do you believe that?)
You made it up, you’re delusional. (Not yet, don’t think so, not just yet.)
It’s a sign, a message. It’s G – – . (Oh, boy.)
5:45 am. I round the corner to Cove Island – low tide. The sulfur released from the exposed mud fills the lungs – gas, pungent smelling salts.
I inhale.
Geese float silently in the shadows.
I run.
I’m around the loop and back, 1/4 mile from the entrance. GPS flashes 4.1 miles in. I don’t glance at the time, that’s been a year now, I’ve conceded. “Matured.” Over 25 years of daily tracking of body weight and notating work-outs, first in a log book, then Excel spreadsheets and now Google Sheets. And also, now, on a parallel path on a digital step tracker which automatically feeds volumes of data into machines and is charted and graphed and spliced into pieces – all of which I never look at. The logging, the tracking, the effort, I mean Really! WHO CARES?
Yet, the tension pulls at both ends, a medieval body rack tearing the limbs from the torso. Wired to Do, whipped by a Mind that makes you Do and strapped to a Body that can no longer Do. And, the Head swims in rip currents.
Miracle. All of it.
August 19, 2016 by 22 Comments
Picture yourself in an airliner, at high altitude. One of the plane engines has just caught fire, the other doesn’t look very well either, and the pilot has to make an emergency landing. Finding yourself in such a situation can be a shattering, yet also a revealing experience. First, there are of course the cries, the tears, the whispered prayers, the loud hysterics. Amid all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you cannot think of anything in any detached, rational fashion. For you have to admit it, you are scared to death, just like everyone else. Yet the plane lands safely and everybody gets off unharmed. After you’ve had a chance to pull yourself together, you start thinking a bit more clearly about what just happened.
That’s when we might realise, for example, how close we can be sometimes to not being at all. And also that there is something oppressively materialistic, to an almost obscene degree, in any ‘brush with death’. Some faulty piece of equipment – a worn-out part, a loose screw, a leaking pipe, anything – could be enough to do us in. That’s all it takes. We thus realise that, when we experience failure, we start seeing the cracks in the fabric of existence, and the nothingness that stares at us from the other side. Yet even as failure pushes us towards the margins of existence it gives us the chance to look at everything – at the world, at ourselves, at what we value most – with fresh eyes. The failure of things, coming as it does with a certain measure of existential threat, exposes us for what we are. And what a sight!
From that unique location – the site of devastation that we’ve become – we understand that we are no grander than the rest of the world. Indeed, we are less than most things. The smallest stone we pick up randomly from a riverbed has long preceded us, and will outlive us. Humans are barely existing entities: how can we claim privileges? Fundamentally, we are vulnerable, fragile creatures. And if, unlike the rest of existence, people are endowed with reason, it is this gift of reason that should lead us to understand how modest our place in the cosmos actually is.
~ Costica Bradatan, Everyone fails, but only the wise find humility
Notes:
- Photo: Celine Bissat Makeup Artist and Photography with “Red Powder” (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
- Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
- Related Live & Live Posts: Miracle. All of it.
