Tag: heart

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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For all matters having to do with that four chambered, fist-shaped muscle we carry – that carries us – with constancy. That beats – did you know? – more than one hundred thousand times a day. Imagine that. Even when we’re pressing snooze and rolling over in bed, folding ourselves into our covers and postponing the day’s bubbling over, and soon after notching cold butter on warm toast, or later coming to a halt as we bound up a flight of subway stairs only to stall behind an elderly woman whose left leg trails behind her right leg – one leaden step at a time – even then, when time decelerates and the relative importance of our lives, of our hurry, undergoes a sudden audit, even then, our heart never stops…My heart continues as ever, pulsing towards its daily quota. More than one hundred thousand times a day. Eighty beats per minute.

~ Durga Chew-Bose, from “Heart Museum” in Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

Photo: Durga Chew-Bose @ Twitter

Monday Morning Wake-up Call

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drums

I hear a sound, reverberating, like a drum with poor memory.
A thing that the wind thumps again and again
against some other object the earth is holding tight…
The sound of a slow heart heard through a stethoscope.

— Tomas Tranströmer, from “Start of a Late Autumn Novel,” The Half-Finished Heaven

Notes: Poem Source – Hidden Sanctuary. Photo – Precious Things

the experience altered him

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bird-in-hand

The musician became a bird lover at the aviary. He tells a story of holding a dying finch one day and feeling overwhelmed by its tiny heartbeat. He had never studied a bird so closely before, never observed its delicate and immaculate plumage, and the experience altered him.

~ Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation 

 

Notes:

A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart.

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la-et-ms-keith-richards-announces-first-solo-album-in-more-than-20-years-20150709

In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people.

To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.

And you listen to some of that meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realize that they knew that too. They knew when to leave one note just hanging up there where it illegally belongs and let it dangle in the wind and turn a dead body into a living beauty.

~ Keith Richards, Life

Notes:

 

Lightly child, lightly.

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blue

Not often,
but now and again there’s a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.

— Mary Oliver, from “Whelks,” New and Selected Poems: Vol. 1.

Notes:

  • Poem: The Vale of Soulmaking.
  • Photograph: Ahsan Uzzaman with Blue (Taupo, Waikato, New Zealand)
  • 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.”