I can't sleep…
I can’t quarrel with the limitations which are part of me—everybody has the severest of limitations. You are ultimately what you collectively wish to be. When someone says they could be so much more, I say, well you better get started right now, who’s stopping you? Face it, there’s an anchor tied to your ass.
~ Jim Harrison, Conversations with Jim Harrison
Notes:
4:50 am.
11 minutes to the 5:01, the first train to Grand Central.
I step onto the front porch into darkness.
And into Salter’s Burning The Days…at both ends.
Peter Cottontail scurries down the driveway, his white tail bobbing. A four-legged leaf clover.
“Did I stop and allow myself to be surprised? Or did I trudge on in a daze?” David Steindl-Rast prods in Awake, Aware and Alert. Yes, David, Yes.
My head is down, I’m watching for icy patches. The footfall is covered with a moon shadow – the mind bleached with a word slurry. First Harrison: If you are strained, lacerated, enervated…take a night walk as far as you can get from a trace of civilization – a dance, and the ghost that follows you, your moon-cast shadow, is your true, androgynous parent. And then Kalanithi: my specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus. Lacerated. Enervated. Specklike. Immensity. My two feet. Flooded with Gratitude. I keep walking.
4 minutes to departure. I pick up the pace. Continue reading “Riding Metro North. And Sleeptalking.”
I was way back in terra incognita with a friend.
At the edge of a black-spruce bog in a thicket
we found a moss-covered cement slab with iron rings.
We are fearful.
We questioned,
what’s under it – hell, a snake pit, the repository of nightmares?
My friend indicates it’s up to me,
I mean the contents.
We lift the slab aside.
The pit is full of brilliant blue sky.
~ Jim Harrison, from “Dream as a Metaphor of Survival,” Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
Credits: Quote – Memory’s Landscape. Art: Trang Bui – Kind of Blue I via Exercice de Style
There are some who can live without wild things
and some who cannot . . .
when the dawn-wind stirs through the ancient cottonwoods,
and the gray light steals down from the hills
over the old river sliding softly past its wide brown sandbars –
what if there be no more goose music?
~ Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac
Notes:
A little snap at one side of the room
and an answering snap at the other:
Stiff from the cold and idleness,
the old house cracking it knuckles.
Then the great yawn of the furnace.
Even the lampshade is drowsy,
its belly full of a warm yellow light.
Out under the moon, though,
there is at least one wish
against this winter sleep:
A road leads into the new year,
deliberate as a bride
in her sparkling white dress of new snow.
~ Ted Kooser. “December 26. Clear and Cold.” Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison
Photograph: {peace&love♥} at lullabyexile via raspberrytart.tumblr.com