heron – Live & Learn

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

July 20, 2020 by Live & Learn 56 Comments

The Good News.

There’s no morning drive to Work. No 40 minute commute home in traffic.

There’s no one hour Metro North ride into the city for Manhattan meetings. No one hour return trip on packed commuter trains jostling for an open seat. There’s no walk to/from the commuter trains in suffocating humidity. As Jeffrey Eugenides puts it: “It was one of those humid days…you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.”

Today, the commute from Bed to Breakfast to Office is less than one minute. Air conditioning cools, a steady 71° degrees.

The Less Good News.

Work Hours: Up ~20% per day. Calls, emails, Zooms, conference calls. Add the pandemic anxiety to the tonic, and you have a giant Boa asphyxiating its prey, as I sit, sit, sit, and sit some more — from daybreak to late dinner, and again the next day, and the next and the next. And the body, and the mind Scream: You’re sliding Pal, things gotta change. These Home Office walls are closing in.

The Pivot. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: covid-19, Gratitude, heron, Nature, pandemic, Photography, quarantine, shelter in place, sunrise, Work

this is how I would…

September 27, 2019 by Live & Learn 20 Comments

The startled blue heron erupts out of its long-legged
inwardness and flies low to the pond over its
shadow. My eye flickers between its great sweep

of wing and its blurred mirror motion almost white
in the pond’s sky-shine. At the end of each wingbeat,
the long body dips toward its rising shadow. Now

the heron settles back down onto itself as far away
from me as the pond allows and I finish my walk half gangly,
half graceful thinking if I were a bird, this is how I’d fly.

~ Nils Peterson, “Blue Heron” from All the Marvelous Stuff (2019)

Notes: Poem via 3quarks Daily. Blue Heron photo: Pennington

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bird, blue heron, fly, heron, Inspirational, Nils Peterson, Photography, Poem, Poetry, water bird, wings

MMWC: Where the Hll is my Breakfast?

July 6, 2015 by Live & Learn 13 Comments

Source: teatimestories (baby blue Heron lookin’ like a pterodactyl). MMWC* = Monday Morning Wake-Up Call.

Filed Under: Inspire, Life, Nature, Photography, Quotes Tagged With: adorable, Baby, Bird, cute, Funny, heron, hungry, Inspirational, Photography, Quotes

Things and Flesh

November 20, 2013 by Live & Learn 12 Comments

Maybe love is the Lord’s trap.
Maybe He sees us as
the tree leaning over the stream.
Perhaps He can’t experience
the difference between
our pain,
our loneliness,
and the heron flying
through the special silence at evening.

— Linda Gregg, closing lines to “The Center of Intent,” from Things and Flesh

Linda Gregg, 71, is an American poet born in Suffern, NY. She grew up in Marin County, California. Her first book of poems, Too Bright to See, was published in 1981. Her published books include Things and Flesh, Chosen By The Lion, The Sacraments of Desire, Alma, Too Bright to See, In the Middle Distance, and All of it Singing. Her poems have also appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Ploughshares, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic Monthly. She taught poetry at various schools and universities across the U.S. She has been living in New York City since 2006.