Tag: light

Lightly Child. Lightly.

Live & Learn25 Comments

I am making a home inside myself. A shelter
of kindness where everything
is forgiven, everything allowed—a quiet patch
of sunlight to stretch out without hurry,
where all that has been banished
and buried is welcomed, spoken, listened to—released.

A fiercely friendly place I can claim as my very own.

I am throwing arms open
to the whole of myself—especially the fearful,
fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts, knowing
every seed and weed, every drop
of rain, has made the soil richer.

I will light a candle, pour a hot cup of tea, gather
around the warmth of my own blazing fire. I will howl
if I want to, knowing this flame can burn through
any perceived problem, any prescribed
perfectionism,
any lying limitation, every heavy thing.

I am making a home inside myself
where grace blooms in grand and glorious
abundance, a shelter of kindness that grows
all the truest things.

I whisper hallelujah to the friendly
sky. Watch now as I burst into blossom.

— Julia Fehrenbacher, “The Most Important Thing” @ JuliaFenrenbacher.com 

Notes:

  • Thank you Beth for sharing @ via Alive on All Channels
  • 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.

 

bathed the rest of the world in a soft apricot light

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Sometimes it was so beautiful it made Raksha ache; when the sun set over the silhouettes of buildings on the far side of the bay and bathed Haga Palace and the rest of the world in a soft apricot light. She hadn’t seen the world’s beauty before now: the cobwebs glistening between the sodden tree-trunks, the clean smell of earth emanating from the ground at this time of year…It seemed to me there was a special luminosity about this place, but it might simply have been the glint on the water. Sometimes, in my mind, a hole opened up in the heavens above and an ethereal light trickled down through the layers of grey cloud and when it filtered between the trees it was like no other light. It was golden, a golden glow from another world.

— Sara Stridsberg, The Antarctica of Love: A Novel. Translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner. (Farrar, Straus and Girous, January 18, 2022)

DK Photo @ 6:15 am this morning. More photos from this morning’s walk here.

Lightly Child. Lightly.

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Nothing to be done, he thinks, nothing at all. Short-term memory loss is an inevitable part of growing old, and if it’s not forgetting to zip your zipper, it’s marching off to search the house for your reading glasses while you’re holding the glasses in your hand, or going downstairs to accomplish two small tasks, to retrieve a book from the living room and to pour yourself a glass of juice in the kitchen, and then returning to the second floor with the book but not the juice, or the juice but not the book, or else neither one because some third thing has distracted you on the ground floor and you’ve gone back upstairs empty-handed, having forgotten why you went down there in the first place. It’s not that he didn’t do those kinds of things when he was young, or forget the name of this actress or that writer or blank out the name of the secretary of commerce, but the older you become, the more often these things happen to you, and if they begin to happen so often that you barely know where you are anymore and can no longer keep track of yourself in the present, you’re gone, still alive but gone. They used to call it senility. Now the term is dementia, but one way or the other, Baumgartner knows that even if he winds up there in the end, he still has a long way to go. He can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same. Good.

— Paul Auster, Baumgartner: A Novel (Atlantic Monthly Press, November 7, 2023)

Notes:

  • 50% thru a short book. Man can write.
  • NY Time Book Review by Fiona Maazel, November 6, 2023: “Paul Auster Walks the Long Valley of Grief in a New Novel. In ‘Baumgartner,’ a professor contends with mortality and the haunting memory of his wife.”
  • 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.

Live & Learn33 Comments

A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy…our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise.

As about the distant, so about the future. It is very dark: but there’s usually light enough for the next step or so.

— C.S. Lewis, from a letter to Bede Griffiths, December 20, 1944, in “Yours, Jack. Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis” (HarperCollins, 2008)

Notes:

  • Thank you Kurt @ Cultural Offering via tail-feathers
  • 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.

Live & Learn9 Comments

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Notes:

  • Quote: Thank you Kurt via Cultural Offering
  • DK Photo @ Cove Island Park this morning. More photo’s here and 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.