Here I am again. I’m full of faults.

And I think that as I’ve aged, I realized everything is an ongoing process. And that it isn’t something that suddenly you’ve done this work and therefore you become enlightened, right? That you’re like, oh, you wake up one day and be like, oh, guess what, I don’t have an ego. I’m not bothered by anything. And instead, of course, it’s just the ongoing slog of being a human and returning to the practice. And OK, here we are again. That’s bothering me. Here I am again. I’m full of faults. […]

I usually sit for at least 15 minutes a day. Sometimes in the morning and sometimes at night. At night, it’s usually because I’ve forgotten to do it in the morning. Or I had something early, an early flight or something like that. But I try to start my day with it. I also try to do — set an intention every day that I just hold with me throughout the day. And sometimes it’s just like, oh, I’m feeling a little stressed out, and I’ll just say let’s just think about ease. And I’ll say, just keep saying the word ease and it comes up. And then my meditation practice — it differs. Sometimes it’s — I think the core is always love and kindness. That’s what I learned many, many years ago. And that’s my fallback.

Ada Limón, from “Ezra Klein Interviews Ada Limón” (Ezra Klein Show, May 24, 2022)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

When something doesn’t find its place… we have to move other things. We have to make room, I think.

—  Samanta Schweblin, Seven Empty Houses. Megan McDowell, Translator (Riverhead Books, October 18, 2022)


Notes:

Monday Morning Wake Up Call

There is nothing more liberating than to realize you don’t have to live up to anything anymore.

— Betty Broderick, Dirty John (Netflix, S2:E6, The Twelfth of Never)


Photo: Esquire

Lightly Child, Lightly.


Notes:

  • Photo: Thomas Turowski (via Newthom)
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar


Notes:

  • Quote Source: WeltenWellen
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Ono No Komachi, tr. by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Oratani, from The Ink Dark Moon Love Poems by Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu


Notes:

  • Photo: DK, Daybreak. 7:02 am. Jan 28, 2020.  26° F, feels like 15° F, wind gusts up to 26 mph. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
  • Quote Source: Feral-ballad
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly

The wind is careless—

uncertain—

I like the wind—

it seems more like me than anything else—

I like the way it blows things around—roughly—even meanly—

then the next minute seems to love everything—some days is amazingly quiet.

—  Georgia O’Keeffe, in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz on October 1, 1917 in: ”My Faraway One. Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Volume 1, 1915–1933

 


Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly

I consider the light that enters the room in the early hours of the day as a messenger of the sun, a direct voyager, a particle, a wave, who knows, but an object of sorts that left its solar source, covered miles, and landed on my skin. So the universe constantly visits us while waiting for us to reverse that itinerary.

—  Etel Adnan, from Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, October 27, 2020)


Notes:

  • Photo: DK, 7:01 a.m. Wed Dec 2, 2020. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
  • Quote via lifeinpoetry
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

…And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I’ll go on home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I’ll get up and do it again
Amen
Say it again
Amen

—  Jackson Browne, from “The Pretender” (1976)


Notes:

  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Walked by this box at Cove Island Park, what, 100x? 200x? 500x? Had never seen it before.  Today, I noticed.

[Read more…]

Lightly Child, Lightly.

I am learning to see.

I don’t know why it is,

but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge


Notes:

  • Photo: DK: Daybreak. November 4, 2020. 37° F, feels like 32° F.  Cove Island Park, Stamford CT
  • Quote Source: Thank you Make Believe Boutique
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

So, what if, instead of thinking about solving your whole life, you just think about adding additional good things. One at a time. Just let your pile of good things grow.

—  Rainbow Rowell, Attachments (Published April 14th 2011 by Dutton)


Notes:

  • Photo: DK: Woodland Park, Darien, CT Oct 28, 2020.
  • Quote Source: Extraordinary Routines.
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Later I went inside, out of the nostalgic sad autumnal smell of leaf smoke, and talked a few minutes to the girl propped in bed with her hair in pigtails. Despite the nausea, her eyes were extraordinarily bright. I thought she looked at me with the soft intensity, the tenderness, that I had seen in the eyes of too many people dying of cancer-the look that says how lovely are the shapes and colors of life and how dear the faces of friends, how desirable it all is, how soon to be lost.

― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things (Penguin Books, December 1, 1991, first published 1967)


Notes:

  • 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.”
  • Photo: Anne Jones with burning leaves

Lightly Child, Lightly.

When I got to the part that went, I shall be telling this with a sigh, he asked, ‘Do we sigh when we think about choices we’re glad we’ve made?’ We went through the whole thing like that. ‘So what do you think the poem is really about?’ he asked me when we were done. I told him it was about how we can’t really know where our choices are going to lead us. ‘Not only that,’ he said, ‘but we’re probably going to regret those choices either way. Frost had a fundamentally tragic view of life. There is always going to be a road not taken. We only get to live once. Nothing we do is ever going to wholly satisfy us in the end.’

— Christopher Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel (Tin House Books, May 5, 2020)


Notes:

  • 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.”
  • Portrait of Christopher Beha: The New School

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

When we choose growth over perfection, we immediately increase our shame resilience. Improvement is a far more realistic goal than perfection. Merely letting go of unattainable goals makes us less susceptible to shame. When we believe “we must be this” we ignore who or what we actually are, our capacity and our limitations. We start from the image of perfection, and of course, from perfection there is nowhere to go but down.

Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it Isn’t). Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” (Penguin Publishing Group, Feb 2007)


Notes: Portrait: NPR, 2019

Lightly Child, Lightly

“Although light is coming down from the top of the piece, it appears to rise from the bottom like the light that rises in the east as the sun goes down in the west, when you are actually looking at the shadow of the earth projected into the atmosphere. In painting, two dimensions are used to allude to three dimensions. Here there is a picture plane which appears to have two dimensions, but that turns out not to be the case. There seems to be a surface that is not there. Here there is a sense of touch, a desire to feel, but there is no object, just as there is no image and no point of focus. There is only perception of itself. There is a tension from the state of desiring touch or from knowing there is something there to touch but not having done it. There is, of course, nothing to touch. The feeling comes with the eyes and the eyes have a feeling as important as physical touch. Just like the moment when you first meet someone and you have yet to touch, to kiss, or to make love. Then the tension exists from not having done it. Here the tension cannot be satisfied by touch and so it is sustained. The eyes do the touching.”

James Turrell, from “James Turrell: A Retrospective” by Michael Govan Christine Y. Kim 


Notes:

  • Photo: James Turrell’s Skyspace, Houston in Texas Monthly, June 2012. Quote via noosphe
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly

“Thinking about daylight and artificial light I have to admit that daylight, the light on things, is so moving to me that I feel it almost as a spiritual quality. When the sun comes up in the morning – which I always find so marvelous, absolutely fantastic the way it comes back every morning – and casts its light on things, it doesn’t feel as if it quite belongs in this world. I don’t understand light. It gives me the feeling there’s something beyond me, something beyond all understanding.”

Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres


Notes:

  • Photo: Stephen Carroll FotoFiction (via Mennyfox55). Quote via noosphe
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly

The light wavers;

perhaps the person holding it is tired.

The steps slow.

The rush seems to be over.

– Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward: A Novel (The Dial Press, January 6, 2020)

 


Notes:

  • Photo: (via Mennyfox55)
  • 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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly

There’s a lightness in things.

Only we people move forever burdened,

pressing ourselves onto everything, obsessed by weight.

How strange and devouring our ways must seem

to those for whom life is enough.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “Part Two XIV,” from Sonnets to Orpheus


Notes:

  • Photo: Elif Sanem Karakoç
  • 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 (Basking ‘On the other’)

On one end – excellence, ambition, discipline, defining what you want to be and working towards it, goals, decisions, structure, control, action, obsession (hold on)

On the other – acceptance, peace, polymorphous selfhood, beingness, letting it flow, spontaneity, appreciation of what is not what you want it to be, release (let go)

In this tension – a life.

~ abhumanaex


Notes:

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