What happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease…A question worth pondering with Michael J. Fox.
Watch entire video here on Youtube or here at CBS Sunday Morning.
Tag: Optimism
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
your fellow sun-worshippers
run
the world. Watch as they kneel to the sun.
~ Frank Bidart, from “The Fifth Hour of the Night” in Paris Review (Issue 229, Summer 2019)
Photo: PDX Daybreak by Jake Egbert (Mt. Hood, Portland, OR)
Sun on skin, smell, particular light, that sort of stuff
The template of self-image I adhere to is that of a happy person. Is this different from being happy? I have no idea. Before the crisis, the bad sank down somewhere I couldn’t reach or was too lazy to get to, and the good floated up as flotsam near the surface. I was usually near the surface too, sometimes impressively active and sometimes just bobbing and lolling, lolling and rolling, the one a front for the other. Bad and Good are weakened words now, blanched of force. Language is failing me too.
Optimism is an under-researched attribute. Where’s the science? Where’s the research? What do our brother creatures – the owls, crabs, bonobos – think about the bright side? What do optimists do under pressure? Do they continue to seek out slivers of silver the size of fingernails in the crushed, smashed and folded lining of the earth? Optimism doesn’t seem to be something you can just adopt. Equally, I can’t be rid of it, even in mid-fall. […]
I am a blessings counter. I am and always was. My family gifted me balance and ballast. By upbringing and temperament it was just one of those things that came with me. I link it to the most rudimentary physical sense of being-in-the-world: sun on skin, smell, particular light, that sort of stuff, and that in turn connects to the articulation of the stretch between being an individual – myself – and non-individuated matter. I have always been able to think of myself as matter: one and many, all-solipsist and nothing at all. Not anything.
~ Marion Coutts, The Iceberg: A Memoir
Notes:
- Related Posts: Marion Coutts – A small, sweet, plosive sound comes from his lips, after each entreaty the same noise, a breath out and a consonant mixed with spit.
- Portrait of Marion Coutts: Standard.co.uk
What’s under it – hell, a snake pit, the repository of nightmares?
I was way back in terra incognita with a friend.
At the edge of a black-spruce bog in a thicket
we found a moss-covered cement slab with iron rings.
We are fearful.
We questioned,
what’s under it – hell, a snake pit, the repository of nightmares?
My friend indicates it’s up to me,
I mean the contents.
We lift the slab aside.
The pit is full of brilliant blue sky.
~ Jim Harrison, from “Dream as a Metaphor of Survival,” Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
Credits: Quote – Memory’s Landscape. Art: Trang Bui – Kind of Blue I via Exercice de Style
Driving I-95 S. With Tiger.
Thursday, February 12, 2015.
It’s 6:12 am.
Overcast, and 17° F. Pre-dawn.
The Groundhog forecasts 6 more weeks, he’s been wrong before.
I-95 South is dry.
The wind kicks up road salt, swirling behind the mud flaps of convoys of truckers barreling into Manhattan.
It’s a race to beat the morning Rush. Smokey & The Bandit. Snowman. Buford T. Justice.
Traffic is light and smooth. VO Manhattan. Neat.
Same car.
Same highway.
Same route.
Same Ólafur Arnalds’ playlist.
Same destination.
Same damn biting cold. Continue reading “Driving I-95 S. With Tiger.”