I can't sleep…
I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings, and then try to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed person.
— David Brooks, The Essential Skills for Being Human (nytimes.com, October 19, 2023)
I was trying in this dream to compose a sentence that would encapsulate the existence of this plant: its flowers were an explosive red, it grew with vigour, its branches sprang out from its stem in a satisfying, meaningful shape. The fact that it grew on the very rim of nothingness was of no concern to it. It grew, it was firmly rooted, it blossomed, it was.
— Helen Garner, One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995.
Notes:
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
2/24/41. We must think of ourselves as a fertile land on which to draw. And if we do not, we grow rotten, like an unmilked cow. And if we leave something unexploited it dies within us wasted. But to tax one’s powers always at their maximum potentiality—this is the only way to live at all, in the proper sense of the word.
— Patricia Highsmith, “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995.″ Anna von Planta (Editor). (Liveright, November 16, 2021)
Notes:
5:45 a.m, and I’m out the door. Dark Sky app says 36° F, feels like 34°, and I call bullsh*t on that. No chance. My finger tips are tingling, a mere handful of steps into my daybreak walk.
But I’m ready. Come and get some of This. Long johns, wool socks, double lined sweatpants, hoody, tuk (tuuuuuuk), a winter coat sewn by one of Dale’s relatives in Northern Quebec, and Norwegian Merino wool gloves. Because Norwegian’s know cold. And, caution flags are flying, need to avoid public areas looking like this, a threat, and get cut down by an AR-15.
What’s good about Cold? It keeps the Chatty’s out of the park. And today, even the regulars are absent. It’s me, and the Herons, Queen’s Guards, stoic, standing in ice cold water, winds gusting off Long Island Sound. Just the way we like it.
94 snaps taken this morning, and that one above has stuck. 92 better shots, but this one won’t let go. It’s the Full moon watching me traipse around the muck in low tide. Robbins: “She wondered how the moon, two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles above…could affect her as profoundly as it did…Yet, as any half-awake materialist knows, that which you hold holds you.” Continue reading “Walking. What you hold, holds you. (Again)”