Daybreak. Egret. 4:57 & 4:59 am. June 27, 2020. 67° F. Humidity 81%. Wind: 2 mph. Gusts: 3 mph. Cloud Cover: 29%. Weed Avenue, Stamford, CT
Saturday Morning
June 20, 2020 by 33 Comments
Notes:
- Daybreak. 5:04 am. June 20, 2020. 67° F. Humidity 100%. Wind: 3 mph. Gusts: 5 mph. Cloud Cover: 13%. Weed Ave, Stamford, CT.
- And inspired by this:
A long dark curve is the poem in your body
is the river
is the loon’s throat.
Have you ever asked yourself how
the loon’s voice
opens?
~ Cheryl Hellner, from “Prayer for the Wild Voice, for Nina” (Heron Dance Journal, Feb 2006)
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
June 15, 2020 by 21 Comments
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either…
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper…
And if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper.
And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see ourselves in this sheet of paper too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, it is par of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. We cannot point out one thing that is not here — time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper…This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, from “Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life”
Photo: Anka Zhuravleva with Head in the Clouds
Sunday Morning
June 7, 2020 by 18 Comments
June 7, 2020. Daybreak. 5:14 a.m. 62° F. Wind: 9 mph, Gusts: 27 mph. Weed Ave, Stamford, CT.
Paul Klee: “One eye sees, the other feels“
Running. No More. (For now)
June 6, 2020 by 37 Comments
“Running is practice for not quitting.”
A line from Robert Andrew Powell’s Memoir titled ”Running Away.”
Unclear why the line stuck after I read it in Beth’s post titled Custodians of the Peace of Mind. But stuck it has. Who’s my Custodian?
Running is practice for not quitting.
It’s been a month. Every day. Every.Single.Day.
Out the door at ~5 am. Backpack over left shoulder, camera in right hand. Both hands occupied, smartphone tucked away, and inaccessible.
I walk.
5 mile loop. 1.5 hours. 50-70 photos. Every morning.
Followed by a photo upload to the P.C.
Then a slow page turn of the pics.
And a deletion of the misfires.
Then a creation of a Google Photo Album, “June 6 2020 Cove Island Park Walk”
Then I connect the Day’s album to the Google Nest Hub Max via my smartphone, which rotates each photo in a slide show on a 10 sec delay.
And, we have a new performance each day.
I’ve moved the Hub Max next to my PC, and there it sits with me, from 7am to 7pm, my entire work day.
Photo’s on the slide show, click, click, click, click. And for that second, I’m swept back to that moment when I took the shot.
During conference calls. During Zoom meetings. During email replies. During text exchanges. Those pictures, that I took, that I made, that captured some beauty in my eye, causing me to stop, and pause, and see…and then snap. They draw me gently away from Work, to the Moment.
Louise’s blog post this morning lands softly. “We call home through everything I do. Everything I create. Everything I am.”
Running is practice for not quitting. I believed this in my bones.
But I’ve quit.
And I like it.
Photo: 6:07 a.m. this foggy morning. 67° F. Wind: 5 mph. Cloud Cover: 68%. Long Island Sound from Weed Ave, Stamford, CT.
T.G.I.F.: It’s Been A Long Week
May 29, 2020 by 34 Comments
“It isn’t about peace, a quiet life, not feeling things, not experiencing things. It’s about the shit hitting the fan, and having the courage to sit with yourself, not hide, not deny–to observe the tumult from the end of the snake’s tongue.”
— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Grove Press; May 12, 2020)
Note: Photo by NB Hunter
Sunday Morning
May 24, 2020 by 32 Comments
Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere…
these moments
count for a lot–peace, you know.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.
This is what the whole thing is about.
— William Stafford, from “Just Thinking” in “Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford”
Photo: Mine. 5:46 a.m. May 24, 2020. 50° F, feels like 46° F. Wind 12 mph, gusts up to 23 mph. Weed Ave/Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
Saturday Morning
May 16, 2020 by 13 Comments
Silence can also be a friend. A comfort and a source of deeper riches. In The Silence That Follows, the poet Rolf Jacobsen wrote:
The silence that lives in the grass
on the underside of each blade
and in the blue space between the stones.
The silence that rests like a young bird in your palms. It is easy to see oneself in Rolf Jacobsen’s experience. Alone out on the ocean, you can hear the water; in the forest, a babbling brook or else branches swaying in the wind; on the mountain, tiny movements between stones and moss. These are times when silence is reassuring. I look for that within myself.
— Erling Kagge, Silence: In the Age of Noise
Notes: Photo by Chris Jones with Blades of Grass. Prior Erling Kagge posts here.
Saturday Morning
April 25, 2020 by 28 Comments
The silence I have in mind may be found wherever you are, if you pay attention, inside your mind, and is without cost. You don’t have to go to Sri Lanka: you can experience it in your bathtub. — I discover silence when I stay five extra minutes in bed at home.
— Erling Kagge, Silence: In the Age of Noise
