John Berger could have written a book called ‘Ways of Listening’. He listened with his whole body. As though my words were rain, and he was the earth. He absorbed everything, gathered every drop, missed absolutely nothing. His listening eyes were lakes in the high mountains. It was love, there’s no other word for it. I don’t think that stillness, that quality of attention, is even possible in digital-age humans, who suckle on mobile phones from the moment they’re born. It’s a generational thing. Lost forever, I believe.
Book Review NY Times: “She Raged. She Terrified. And She Shape Arundhati Roy. The prizewinning novelist’s unsparing memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” captures the eventful life and times of her mother, a driven educator and imperfect inspiration.”
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.
Gently he grasped the copper handle of the door – the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then – he started opening the door – he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.
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.
“And the part about light as a living creature,” he said. “What a beautiful thought. I hadn’t really heard that idea before…It really got me for a second,” he said. “I had to think about it. Is light alive? I mean, it doesn’t excrete anything. It doesn’t reproduce. And yet it gives life, so it must have some kind of life to give…” He’d isolated the ultimate kernel…the very idea that I’d fallen in love with, the idea of light as a kind of amniotic fluid flooding the cosmos.
DK Photo @ 5:23 am this morning. Nobadeer Beach. 57° F. Nantucket, MA. More photos from this morning’s glorious walk 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.
It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.
— C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity (Tingle Books, May 17 2024) (via The Hammock Papers)
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.
Anna wandered down to the sea. She knelt in front of some of the stone nest houses and peered in. Anna’s life here was, I was coming to see, devoted to paying attention to – or, more than that, being completely committed to – the beauty of the world before her. She seemed to have done it by cultivating an extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise. She used every ounce of her willfulness to shut out the world and concentrate on these simple things. More and more, she reminded me of my grandfather. He spent many hours walking his farm and learning about the wild things upon it, like it was the most important work a human could do. Growing up, I’d wanted to be like him. And I was, for three or four years, after I left school. I’d go for walks over the fields; on sunny nights I’d sit with my back against a rock or climb into the lower branches of a tree and watch the world happening around me. I’d spend hours just watching deer or foxes or badgers, or swifts tumbling and screaming through the sky. I’d lie on my back in the grass and watch the swallows hawking after flies round my dad’s cows, or the brown hares playing in the meadows. But somewhere in the years since, I’d stopped being that person. Life was too busy to stand and stare. I became responsible for boring, necessary things. At one point I had three jobs and worked most nights and weekends. D. H. Lawrence once wrote that the industrial age had created a new kind of human, a machine-like man with iron in his soul. I had become one of them. The past few years had been swallowed up by striving. I remembered a friend back home trying to tell me, gently, that I had become almost manic. But the longer I spent with Anna, the more that way of being felt like a sickness I needed to recover from. A new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.
Anna reminded me that the first rule of living is to live. To see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world. The more I tuned in, the closer Anna and I were growing as friends. I was beginning a journey back to the person I had once been – and needed to be again.
Book Review: A warming tale of gathering eiderdown in Norway. Shepherd’s Life author trades the Lake District for a remote island just below the Arctic Circle, where he joins an ‘unbreakable’ septuagenarian keeping an ancient family tradition alive.
Book Review in The Guardian: “Duck Tales. The Lakeland shepherd heads to a Norwegian island where eiderdown is harvested to learn lessons about nature and humanity”
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.
