Tag: leaf

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?

— Victoria Chang, “Passage” in The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang, published by Copper Canyon Press, 2022. (via Read a Little Poetry)

Notes:

  • Video: InnoRecords (via Pexels)
  • 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.

Saturday Morning

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For the sake of cleansing seconds
stare at something still.
Free from feeling filled
hum the sound of the sun descending
sitting in its final ribbons.
Watch what leaves shake
in the unseen breeze.
Feel your own fingers.

Let time be soil for time.
Let hunger set in

~ Sean Kearny, “Be Bored” from Press 1  (Fall 2014)

 

Notes: Poem from 3quarksdaily.com. Photo credit to JP Benante

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn16 Comments

Notes:

  • “A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees” by Owen Gent. Illustration based on the beautiful book a Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees by Kenko. “There was not a sound except for the soft drip of water from a bamboo pipe buried deep in fallen leaves…Moved, I said to myself, ‘One could live like this’”
  • 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.”

 

Sunday Morning

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Those two or three seconds of silence! Two or three seconds when nothing happened, a moment of suspension. The beauty of that silence! That lull. That pause, when nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. “Zurückbleiben” emanating from a different throat at every station, here a woman’s, there a man’s, with slight variations in stress, sometimes placed on zurück, sometimes on bleiben: the word was magical, narcotic. After Zurückbleiben everything came to a halt, stopped short, the history of the world paused momentarily.

~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration: An Essay

Source: Your Eyes Blaze Out

Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing

Live & Learn18 Comments

leaf-falling-gif
Again I resume the long lesson:
how small a thing can be pleasing,
how little in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.

Within the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed light,
a few leaves fall of their own weight.

The sky is gray.
It begins in mist almost at the ground
and rises forever.
The trees rise in silence
almost natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but not quite.

What more did I think I wanted?
Here is what has always been.
Here is what will always be.
Even in me,
the Maker of all this returns in rest,
even to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly falling,
and is pleased.

– Wendell Berry

Notes: