Tag: Gratitude

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn31 Comments

It was one of the October days when to breathe the air is like drinking wine, and every touch of the wind against one’s face is a caress.

— Sarah Orne Jewett, “The Country of the Pointed Firs” (Houghton Mifflin, 1896)

Notes:

  • DK Photo. October 22, 2022. Calf Pasture Beach, Norwalk, CT
  • 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.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn17 Comments

One of the things that I find haunting or difficult to accept is that I only get one life. I’m condemned to being myself, and I have to be me until the end. In a way, being a novelist allows me to get around that problem…

But what you’re talking about and what I’m talking about might be closer than you think. Because what you’re describing I also feel. Especially when I’m in the middle of a project and I close my laptop and return to my own life, I feel that sense of indescribable gratitude that I am alive on this earth, that my loved ones are a part my life and that I can experience the sensory reality of the earth that we share.⁠⁠

— Sally Rooney, in “Sally Rooney Thinks Growth is Overrated” (NY Times Interview by David Marchese, September, 21, 2024)

Sally Rooney’s new book Intermezzo is released tomorrow. Here’s the Irish Times book review. She is the best selling author of Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018), and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).

Light Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn19 Comments

When I was younger I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money jobs that became my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger.

— Ia Genberg, The Details: A Novel (translated by Kira Josefsson) (HarperVia, August 8, 2023)

Notes: 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.

Go Flossy!

Live & Learn25 Comments

Thank you Susan for sharing.

Monday Morning Wake-up Call

Live & Learn21 Comments

I put my hand on the altar rail. ‘What if … what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or …’ Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite’ … ’S’pose Heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there for ever, but more like … Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost …”

― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (Random House; September 2, 2014)

Notes:

  • Quote source: Thank you Dreaming in the Deep South
  • Image: Wiosna (Spring), 1933. Leon Wyczólkowski, Polish (1852-1936). Watercolor, ink, pastel on paper. 71 x 79 cm