I can't sleep…
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:
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:
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.
Notes:
We start out wanting everything, never imagining how much everything weighs. Then we can’t swallow things that eat at our gut. We call this integrity. Then one by one, we’re forced to put things down in order to go on. Like a bird dropping food three times its size in order to fly.
~ Mark Nepo, from “How to Empty” in Things That Join the Sea and the Sky: Field Notes on Living
Notes:
You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so.
Notes: Quote – Thank you Whiskey River. Photo: Jacqueline Green, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Photo by Richard Calms. (via Mennyfox55)