Tag: Ocean

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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[…] I’m old but not when I go for a swim. A transformation takes place. In fact, it’s surprising how much younger the body feels in water.

What happens to the body in water — the flabby, bony, wrinkled body, I mean; my body, I mean — is a quiet miracle. You’re trudging along on land, reluctantly dragging the 1940s cargo vessel you’ve become, and then you step oh-so-carefully into the water.

As soon as your body feels the cool liquid element around you, you’re ageless. Memory takes you back to childhood, and you swim just as you did in your 20s, though this time you have brains.

And that’s the beauty of it. Age has endowed you with knowledge and experience. Now, in water, you have achieved the impossible. You’re young and old simultaneously. A wet Dorian Gray. […}

Obviously I feel none of that. I’m just an old man enjoying the water and the quiet, feeling peaceful if a bit tired, almost but not quite like an Irish selkie, who lives on land only temporarily, and whose true home is the sea.

— Roger Rosenblatt, from “Flabby, Wrinkled, Happy…I’m Old But Not When I Swim” (NY Times, August 2, 2025)

Saturday Morning. Why I Wake Early.

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Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

—  Mary Oliver, from “Mindful” in Why I Wake Early.

Notes:

  • Photo: DK @ 6:03 a.m. this morning. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. 47F. More photos from this morning here.
  • Mary Oliver via Alive on All Channels

Trees and water. Simple and beautiful. Beautiful and simple.

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The water had been so cold. Its coldness seemed to spread not only from my throat and into my thorax, but also from the cavity of my mouth and into my head. But it was a different coldness than was in the air. This one was pleasant, as if smoothing and enfolding. And what was inside me became clearer to me, too. My heart beating with such simple beauty. The blood streaming to every part of my body. Yes, the blood streaming, the heart beating, and the emotions too, likewise of such simple beauty, diffusing in a different way from the blood, moving more like shadows on the ground when the sun passed behind a cloud, suddenly to re-emerge, flooding everything, first in one way, which was joy, then in another, which was sadness. And all as the heart beat and beat. And the trees grew, the water ran, the moon shone, the sun burned. The heart and the blood. Joy and sadness. Trees and water. Simple and beautiful. Beautiful and simple.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star: A Novel. (Martin Aitken, Translator.) (Penguin Press, September 28, 2021)

Notes:

the great chain of life

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“Expeditions like these teach us why we need to increase our efforts to restore and better understand marine ecosystems everywhere — because the great chain of life that begins in the ocean is critical for human health and well being. Check out just a small portion of some of the amazing encounters that were experienced via Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) SuBastian during the expedition.”  (Thank you for sharing Christie!)

Monday Morning Wake Up Call

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DK. Daybreak. November 9, 2020. 6:35 to 6:50 am, 44° F. Wind: Light. 3 mph. Cove Island Park, Stamford CT