Tag: living

All I could hear was my heart pumping and pumping

Live & Learn10 Comments

icicles,sun,sunset,sunrise,winter

I got up in the night and went to the end of the hall.
Over the door in large letters it said,
“This is the next life. Please come in.”
I opened the door.
Across the room a bearded man in a pale-green suit turned to me and said,
“Better get ready, we’re taking the long way.”
“Now I’ll wake up,” I thought, but I was wrong.
We began our journey over golden tundra and patches of ice.
Then there was nothing for miles around,
and all I could hear was my heart pumping and pumping
so hard I thought I would die all over again.

— Mark Strand, The Triumph of the Infinite

Mark Strand, 79, was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. He is an American Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blizzard of One. This passage is an excerpt from his new book titled “Almost Invisible” which is comprised of whimsical, prose-style dramas that explore the receding vista of life while posing eloquent, riddle-like conundrums about the human condition. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.” (Source: Amazon.)  Find the book at this link.
Credits: Poem – Fables of the Reconstruction. Photograph: “Fire & Ice” by Steve Taylor via Elinka. Thank you

Things and Flesh

Live & Learn12 Comments

great egret, forest park

Maybe love is the Lord’s trap.
Maybe He sees us as
the tree leaning over the stream.
Perhaps He can’t experience
the difference between
our pain,
our loneliness,
and the heron flying
through the special silence at evening.

— Linda Gregg, closing lines to “The Center of Intent,” from Things and Flesh 

Linda Gregg, 71, is an American poet born in Suffern, NY.  She grew up in Marin County, California.  Her first book of poems, Too Bright to See, was published in 1981.  Her published books include Things and Flesh, Chosen By The Lion, The Sacraments of Desire, Alma, Too Bright to See, In the Middle Distance, and All of it Singing. Her poems have also appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Ploughshares, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic Monthly.  She taught poetry at various schools and universities across the U.S. She has been living in New York City since 2006.

Source: Poem – Thank you A Poet Reflects. Photograph: Thank you Amy Buxton

I am what I am, and I do what I do

Live & Learn35 Comments

anthony-hopkins-2

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me, and think of me. I am what I am, and I do what I do. I expect nothing, and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier.

— Anthony Hopkins

Credits: Portrait – geektyrant; Quote – Emotional Alegbra

It seems too good to be true

Live & Learn24 Comments

galaxy-life-stars

“Some things occur just by chance. Mark Twain was born on the day that Halley’s comet appeared in 1835 and died on the day it reappeared in 1910. There is a temptation to linger on a story like that, to wonder if there might be a deeper order behind a life so poetically bracketed. For most of us, the temptation doesn’t last long. We are content to remind ourselves that the vast majority of lives are not so celestially attuned, and go about our business in the world. But some coincidences are more troubling, especially if they implicate larger swathes of phenomena, or the entirety of the known universe. During the past several decades, physics has uncovered basic features of the cosmos that seem, upon first glance, like lucky accidents. Theories now suggest that the most general structural elements of the universe — the stars and planets, and the galaxies that contain them — are the products of finely calibrated laws and conditions that seem too good to be true. What if our most fundamental questions, our late-at-night-wonderings about why we are here, have no more satisfying answer than an exasperated shrug and a meekly muttered ‘Things just seem to have turned out that way’?

It can be unsettling to contemplate the unlikely nature of your own existence, to work backward causally and discover the chain of blind luck that landed you in front of your computer screen, or your mobile, or wherever it is that you are reading these words. For you to exist at all, your parents had to meet, and that alone involved quite a lot of chance and coincidence. If your mother hadn’t decided to take that calculus class, or if her parents had decided to live in another town, then perhaps your parents never would have encountered one another. But that is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Even if your parents made a deliberate decision to have a child, the odds of your particular sperm finding your particular egg are one in several billion. The same goes for both your parents, who had to exist in order for you to exist, and so already, after just two generations, we are up to one chance in 1027. Carrying on in this way, your chance of existing, given the general state of the universe even a few centuries ago, was almost infinitesimally small. You and I and every other human being are the products of chance, and came into existence against very long odds…”

Read more @ Aeon Magazine by Tim Maudlin: The Calibrated Cosmos: Why Does The Universe Appear Fine Tuned For Life?

And I loved this one too by Mark Morford: 40 Billion Ways to Dance.

Image Credit

If we’re not supposed to dance

Live & Learn36 Comments

bird-autumn-leaves-sing

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but…
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

~Gregory Orr

Sources: Photograph: Sensualstarfish. Poem: Thank you Karen @ Tearinyourhand. Gregory Orr Bio.