Tag: Parent

Lie back daughter, let your head be tipped back in the cup of my hand.

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Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls…
You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea…
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

~ Philip Booth, from “First Lesson” in  Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999

Notes: Photo by mary-annm. Poem via 3 Quarks Daily

Growing Up (60 sec.)

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Not yet. Not yet.

Bring out the tissue box…

this feeling…unspoken and unacknowledged and invisible

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Michael Chabon, in his new collection of autobiographical essays, “Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces”…shares various insights into fatherhood…In one essay, he recalls a recent visit to his own father…The older man was recovering from an illness, and the two lay on a bed and watched a movie together in silence. It took Mr. Chabon back to his own childhood, when they often sat together quietly watching movies… The realization made him more conscious of the importance of sharing such time with his own children: Just being together was valuable. “That makes me look more mindfully at moments where I’m sitting on a couch with my daughter watching shows on HGTV,” he says. “I’m sitting here and she’s sitting there and she puts her feet up on my lap.”  “…this feeling,” he says, “that this is a way that I experience love…that is unspoken and unacknowledged and invisible.”

~ Alexandra Wolfe, edited from Michael Chabon Wants to be a Good Father (WSJ, June 8, 2018)

Riding Metro North. Walking backwards.

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7:34 p.m. train. Grand Central station. Last peak hour train home. Standing room only. Heads down, glowing screens, wifi slow, thousands sucking on the same straw. Pages loading slowly, then stopping altogether. One head, after another, mine too, lifting in frustration.  Beach ball spinning, locked up. There’s a message in this. To thousands of us sitting on this train. Whether we are listening, now that is another story.

8:31 p.m. Walk home. Down the platform. Up the stairs. Across the bridge over I-95. Up the hill – and the last 1/4 mile stretch, before losing this tie, this shirt sticking to my back, and these leather shoes strapped around my feet for last 12 hours. Free me, please!

I see them in the distance. Two boys, 7 or 8 years old, kicking a soccer ball on front yard. Mom sitting on the porch reading. When’s the last time I’ve seen this? Continue reading “Riding Metro North. Walking backwards.” →

Truth

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Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception. The child is enthralled, and then the mother comes into the room and says to the child, “That’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird.” Instantly the complex wave of the angel, peacock, iridescent, transformative mystery is collapsed into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. “This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky,” and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of disempowered perception.

~ Terence McKenna, Ordinary Language, Visible Language and Virtual Reality 

Notes: Quote via cobotis. Photo: Ahmed via Eyeem via Newthom.com