Notes:
- Photo: Sully waking up… (Susan’s Photo)
- Sully background…
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
April 18, 2022 by 26 Comments
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
January 31, 2022 by 32 Comments
Monday Morning
November 22, 2021 by 16 Comments
5/24/41…
After all that, the change … was like the sudden, unwelcome awakening from a glorious dream. An awakening on a Monday morning when, with one’s castle and clouds and the silver sea dissolved into a sordid room, one realizes that one has to get up and dress in the cold night in a few minutes and plod through a weary day.
— Patricia Highsmith, “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995.″ Anna von Planta (Editor). (Liveright, November 16, 2021)— Patricia Highsmith, Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995
Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 6:52 a.m., November 22, 2021. 48° F & Rain. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. Related Swan posts: Swan1
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
August 2, 2021 by 14 Comments
Where would you begin?
Where would you end?
— Joyce Maynard, Count the Ways: A Novel (William Morrow (July 13, 2021)
Notes:
- Book, recommended.
- Kirkus Book Review: Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with.
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
May 24, 2021 by 27 Comments
Photo by Andrew Mayes titled “Monday Morning Mood.” “I took this shot while photographing a group of Pied starlings perched in a tree at the Rietvlei Nature Reserve in South Africa. It perfectly sums up my mood on most Monday mornings :).”
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
April 19, 2021 by 24 Comments
We ought to ask ourselves again and constantly: Why fill our lives with such effort and torment, when we know that we will be here only once and when we have such a brief and unrepeatable time in this indescribably beautiful world?
— Semezdin Mehmedinovic, My Heart: A Novel. (Catapult, March 9, 2021)
Notes:
- Photo: DK @ Daybreak @ 5:25 am, April 19, 2021. 46° F. Calf Pasture Beach, Norwalk, CT
- New York Times Book Review of My Heart titled “Forgetting Doesn’t Kill You, but It Sure Feels Like It.”
Monday Morning Wake Up Call
March 15, 2021 by 32 Comments
She felt along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let her out. This could not be forced. Outside, the air hung swagged and the clouds sat in piles of couch stuffing, and in the south of the sky there was a tender spot, where a rainbow wanted to happen.
Then three sips of coffee, and a window opened.
— Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This: A Novel (Riverhead Books, February 16, 2021)
Portrait via Esquire: “In the Face of Tragedy, Patricia Lockwood Found the Real World Again. In her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, the poet laureate of Twitter engulfs readers in “internet poisoning”—and memorializes someone she loved and lost.” Lockwood is the author of the acclaimed 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy.
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
March 8, 2021 by 19 Comments
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this.” Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions–trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there….
— Virginia Woolf, from “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader 1925)
Notes:
- Quote via Whiskey River. Portrait via The New Yorker
- Inspired by: “We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. ~ Stefan Zweig, Confusion (NYRB Classics; Tra edition (July 25, 2012) (via The Hammock Papers)
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
December 28, 2020 by 23 Comments
How much space for remembering is there in a day? How much should there be? I think about this in my poetry. I don’t want to be a nostalgist. Yet I feed on memory, need it to make poems, the art that is made of the stuff I have: my life and the world around me. I am grateful for the tug of the day that gets us out of bed and propels us into our lives and responsibilities; memory can be a weight on that. And yet, in it floods, brought willfully, or brought on by a glimpse, a glance, a scent, a sound.
— Elizabeth Alexander, “The Light of the World: A Memoir.”
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
December 21, 2020 by 50 Comments
Daybreak. December 21, 2020. 6:45 to 7:46 am. 34° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford CT
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
December 7, 2020 by 27 Comments
You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life … All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it–tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest–if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself–you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Notes:
- Quote: Thank you Vale of The Soul-making
- Photo: Today, 6:34 a.m. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. 28° F feels like 24° F.
Monday Morning Wake Up Call
October 26, 2020 by 30 Comments
Ordinary isn’t the enemy but instead something nourishing and unavoidable, the bedrock upon which the rest of experience ebbs and flows. Embrace this — the warm water, the pruned hands, the prismatic gleam of the bubbles and the steady passage from dish to dish to dish — and feel, however briefly, the breath of actual time, a reality that lies dormant and plausible under all the clutter we pile on top of it. A bird makes its indecipherable call to another bird, a song from a passing car warps in the Doppler effect and I’m reminded, if only for a moment, that I need a lot less than I think I do and that I don’t have to leave my kitchen to get it.
– Mike Powell, An Ode to Washing the Dishes (NY Times Magazine, June 4, 2019)
Notes: Quote Source: Extraordinary Routines. Photo: Medium
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
October 5, 2020 by 17 Comments
Or is this what being home is like: home as a place from which the entire world is suddenly possible?
— Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
Image: Let’s Eat Cake
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
September 28, 2020 by 18 Comments
We must be done with cruelty especially to ourselves,
to start again beaming like the sun;
fresh.
— Alice Walker, Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart; The World Rising
Notes: Photo: DK, Monday, Sept 14, 2020, 6:26 am. The Cove. Stamford, CT. Quote: via korraled
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
August 31, 2020 by 40 Comments
Notes:
- Daybreak. August 31, 2020. 5:59 to 6:08 am. 60° F. Humidity 70%. Wind: 6 mph. Gusts: 7 mph. Cloud Cover: 32%. The Cove, Stamford, CT
- Inspired (again) by Helen Macdonald: “I kept trying to find the right words to describe certain experiences and failing. My secular lexicon didn’t capture what they were like. You’ve probably had such experiences yourself – times in which the world stutters, turns and fills with unexpected meaning. When rapturousness claims a moment and transfigures it. The deep hush before an oncoming storm; the clapping of wings as a flock of doves rises to wheel against low sun; a briar stem in the sun glittering with blades of hoarfrost. Love, beauty, mystery. Epiphanies, I suppose. Occasions of grace. — Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (Grove Press, August 25, 2020)
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call (Up!)
May 4, 2020 by 26 Comments
Notes:
- Inspired by Natalie Portman, 2015 Harvard Commencement Speech: “It was instructive for me to see that for ballet dancers — once your technique gets to a certain level — the only thing that separates you from others is your quirks,” Portman said. “Or even, flaws … You can never be the best technically. Someone will always have a higher jump or a more beautiful line. The only thing you can be the best at is developing your own self.”
- Image via Mennyfox55
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
March 9, 2020 by 13 Comments
And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.
– D. H. Lawrence from “We are Transmitters” in The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence
Notes: Poem, thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Mikael Aldo
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
March 2, 2020 by 40 Comments
I suppose if there is a reckoning in middle age, it’s a tragic sense that you have been formed by things, and sent hither and thither by those things, and put in a frenzy and made to run around the place, and up and down the house in the service of those things, and they were not real. They were the product of your upbringing or conditioning or gender or social class. And I think there’s a certain point where suddenly the grip of all of that on you loosens. It’s like a stage set beginning to sort of crumble, and you start to see it wobbling, and I think you can get some really startling and frightening perspectives on identity once you start looking at it from there. The thought that you’ve wasted your entire life in the service of things that didn’t really exist – that you were in a prison where the door, in fact, was open, and you’ve sat there all this time . . .
~ Rachel Cusk, in an interview by Sheila Heti (Paris Review, Art of Fiction No. 246, Spring 2020)
Photo: Rachel Cusk in NY Times
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