Tag: Ocean Vuong

Walking. The life that won’t let go.

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The sun rises at 5:21 a.m, the earliest day/time of the year. I set my internal clock (each morning) 90 minutes ahead of Sunrise to catch twilight, that’s 3:45 a.m. Groan.

It’s been 1,865 consecutive (almost) days, and counting, on this morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

One could say, same-old same-old track, ‘How about a change?’ A new track? Mix it up a little?

Yet, I’m grooved in this track, akin to deliberately steering within deep ruts of a muddy country road to keep forward momentum. Ocean Vuong: “It seemed the light wouldn’t change for a while. When he was younger Hai had wanted a bigger life. Instead he got the life that won’t let him go.“

There are days (among the 1,865 consecutive days) when you get out of the car, and tell yourself: “Self, there ain’t nothing here, you’re tired, snap a shot to prove you were here, drive back home and snuggle up to Wally.”

That day wasn’t today.

Park is empty. Birds have awakened. I pick up the pace, heartbeat quickening. I arrive at the shoreline at look out.

65° F, gentle breaths of wind from the north. A strip of golden light paints the horizon. Luna pops her head in and out between gaps in heavy cloud cover, splashing golden light on the ocean surface.

I could feel it today.

The Cove won’t let me go.

“How you can fall in love with the light.”

Ellen Meloy: Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.

DK Photo @ 4:09 am. June 13, 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning’s walk here. A magnificent morning.

more, more, more

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Unlike writing, which is a vocation mired with maybes, the camera, for all of its complex mechanisms, can only say yes. Photography is, for me, a medium of unanimous affirmation, the shutter creating a yes so total, so entire, nothing in its frame can be denied presence. Though the impulse to fire the shutter can be entangled with doubt, the act is swift and irreversible. Once the photo is made, the only way to turn back is to destroy it.

If, as the photographer Garry Winogrand has said, we take photographs to see how the world looks when photographed, I make pictures of my brother to see the parts in him I cannot see in real time, my eyes too myopic, fleeting or faulty. The photograph invites true study, the frame fixing the world in place so that myth and truth accrue within our gaze. In this way, the image offers more of a person than what was first attainable at first glance. The shutter goes from saying yes, yes, yes to more, more, more.

— Ocean Vuong, from “My Brother’s Keeper” (NY Times, June 11 2025)

Notes:

  • Photo of Strawberry Moon @ 4:19 am this morning @ Cove Island Park. See more pictures of the moon, the fog, the sunrise, egrets, herons, and an amazing TIME LAPSE VIDEO — all found here.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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“No, eat the carrot first. Please.” She leaned forward, knife and fork on each side of the plate, a paper towel tucked in her collar. “It’s important.” He finished the carrot, then picked another from the bowl and put the whole thing in his mouth. “They’re good for you, believe me.” … “For the eyes, right?” “That’s a lie… Carrots,” she paused for effect, “give you the will to live.” “What do you mean?” he said, chewing. “It’s a root. And roots prevent you from getting the blues.” She picked one from the bowl; it gleamed under the kitchen light. “You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far—like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.”

— Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel (Penguin Press, May 13, 2025)

Notes:

  • NY Times Book Review: “Odd Couple Roommates, Bonds by Pills and Precarity. Ocean Vuong’s florid new novel, which seeks to find the dignity in dead-end jobs.”
  • Guardian Book Review: “‘Heartbreak and hope”
  • 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.

Sunday Morning. Yehi or!

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No, it’s not my morning walk @ Daybreak @ Cove Island Park. Not yet 831 consecutive days, like in a row. It’s too damn early for that. 3 hours and 12 minutes before sunrise, to be precise. And here we are. As Ocean Vuong states in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: “Let me begin again.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Let me begin again?” or, “Here we go again?”

2:36 a.m. I snatch the iPhone and check Sleep data: 5 consecutive days < 4 hours sleep. I check the Dark Sky app: Clear skies.

Sully pauses his snoring to open an eyelid. His big brown eye looking through me: What is wrong with you Man? He turns his head, and falls back asleep.

I slip out of bed, head downstairs, my bare feet pattering on the hard wood floors, careful not to trip over myself in the darkness. I step outside, scanning the skies. There you are. Waiting for me.

It’s quiet. No Metro-North train whistles in the distance, the last train passing an hour ago. No dogs barking. No critters scurrying in the shrubs. Just me, and the cool grass under my toes, and my mind whirring.

Continue reading “Sunday Morning. Yehi or!” →

Saturday Morning

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I love going on walks by myself. No pressure to keep up conversation. And there is something about movement that helps me think. To charge an idea with the body’s inertia. To carry a feeling through the distance and watch it grow.

—  Ocean Vuong, The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation (therumpus.net, August 24, 2014)

Photo: Daybreak. 5:49 a.m., April 30, 2022. 41° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.