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Driving I-95 S. With Ray…

June 8, 2018 by 28 Comments

9 p.m. Thursday evening.

2.5 hours of sleep the night before – the body (and mind) have quit. I’m done. It’s done.

An eggshell blue Extra Strength Tylenol PM caplet rolls in the palm of my hand.  Please. Work your magic. Free me of this Mind. These thoughts. These chains. This swirl. This madness. Just let go.Of me. Please.

And it does. I find Goldbarth’s layer on layer, down and down. And down I went.

5:40 a.m. this morning.

I blink to clear the plume of narcotic, misting Tylenol PM.  Both hands grip the wheel – Steady DK, Steady. There’s a giant Semi to my right, Transpro Intermodal Trucking Inc., Bensalem PA, and a five-foot high barrier on my left…thousands of pounds of concrete which I can reach out and touch.  Lane feels tight. Walls on both sides close in. Steady DK. Steady. I reduce speed to 55, glance in the rear view mirror, wait for oncoming traffic to clear, and swing the car across two lanes. The convoy of trucks and early morning commuters stream by – all racing to beat The Rush to Manhattan.  Not today Friends. Not today. I’m out.

6:05 a.m.

It’s me and a floor of empty offices and desks. The air conditioning is humming. The overhead florescent tubes buzz. I log into my PC, wait for the gremlins to load. While I’m waiting, I flick through WordPress posts.  It’s Ray on the rural roads in South Carolina.  My eyes scan his post, my pulse slows, the body softens and I’m swept away in “Take the Backroads“:

“There is something refreshing about making your way through cornfields, strawberry fields, horse farms and peach orchards at 50mph or so. It is much more relaxing than driving on the Interstate at 75mph and being passed by 18 wheelers…I made my way the thirty-two miles from the meeting back home, I drove, windows down,  through a large cornfield as the sun was setting. The air was fresh and sweet and since there was little traffic, I was able to drive well below the posted speed limit, breath deep and take it all in. When I was younger, I never would have done that. I probably should have.”

Yes Ray.

Yes.

Notes:

  • Inspired by : “One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important… There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.” – G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels)
  • Photo: via Mennyfox55
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Lightly Child, Lightly.

May 31, 2018 by 13 Comments

In silence which is active, the Inner Light begins to glow – a tiny spark. For the flame to be kindled and to grow, subtle argument and the clamour of our emotions must be stilled

The word born of silence must be received in silence.

~ Pierre Lacout, Quaker Faith & Practise (2.12) in Twelve Quakers and Worship

Notes:

  • Photo: Patty Maher. Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • 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.”

 

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Sunday Morning

May 20, 2018 by 28 Comments

Holy silence is spacious and inviting. You can drink it down. We offer it to ourselves when we work, rest, meditate, bike, read. When we hike by ourselves, we hear a silence still pristine with crunching leaves and birdsong…During congregational silences, in meditation rooms or halls, in prison cells and meeting rooms, in silent confession at church, all these screwed-up people like us, with tangled lives and minds, find their hearts opening through quiet focus. In unfolding, we are enfolded, and there is a melding of spirits, a melding of times, eternal, yesterday morning, the now, the ancient, even as we meet beneath a digital clock on the wall, flipping its numbers keeping ordinary time in all that timelessness.

~ Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy

Notes: Quote – Thank you Make Believe Boutique. Photo: Franziska Korries (via Newthom)

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T.G.I.F.

April 27, 2018 by 29 Comments

As he grew older, his life turned into an agreeable routine, with enough human contact to sustain and divert, but not disturb, him. He knew the contentment of feeling less. His emotional life was recast as a social life. He was on nodding and smiling terms with many… He prized stoicism and calm, which he had achieved less through some exercise of philosophy, more from a slow growth within him; a growth like coral, which in most weathers was strong enough to keep out the ocean breakers. Except when it wasn’t.

~ Julian Barnes, The Only Story (Alfred A. Knopf, April 17, 2018)

Art: Phenomenon no. 1 by WanJim Gim (Seoul, Korea)

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Saturday Morning

April 21, 2018 by 13 Comments

clouds

Still looking for bliss in nothing at all, the cloudy mind moving over existence, outside time.

~ Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day (Published April 17, 2018)

Notes:

  • Post Inspired by Patricia Hampl: “Daydreaming doesn’t make things up. It sees things. Claims things, twirls them around, takes a good look. Possesses them. Embraces them. Makes something of them. Makes sense. Or music. How restful it is, how full of motion. My first paradox. I couldn’t care less what it’s called. It’s pure pleasure. Infinite delight…This is what is called the life of the mind. It’s what I want to do. It’s where I want to be. Right here.” (Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day)
  • Photo by Mikael Aldo (via see more)
  • Related Posts: Patricia Hampl

 

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T.G.I.F.: “I’m done.”

April 20, 2018 by 31 Comments

Onward to the night, which is to say insomnia, cell phone on the bedside table, the mind drilling away with yet more frantic interior list-making. Don’t forget! Remember to … Have you … Did you …? Whole decades can go this way—and have—not just in domestic detail, but awash in the brackish flotsam of endeavor, failure and success, responsibility and reward. My work, as I say with foolish vanity. Deadlines piled upon deadlines. That devilishly apt word deadline, the heart seizing as if shot, hands wringing for a reprieve—a week, a day? But delivering. Always delivering. You can count on me. That, in fact, is the problem…

What a surprise—to discover it’s all about leisure, apparently, this fugitive Real Life, abandoned all those years to the “limitless capacity for toil.” What a hard worker you are: always taken as a compliment. You can count on me. Smiling. Deadline met. Always. You should try meditating or maybe yoga, yoga’s good, someone suggested when I mentioned the fevered to-do lists, the sometimes alarming blood pressure readings, the dark-night-of-the-soul insomnia. But meditating is just another thing. Yoga? Another task, yet another item for the to-do list. I find I cannot add another item. I’m done.

~ Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day (Published April 17, 2018)

Portrait: upne.com

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Sunday Morning

April 15, 2018 by 20 Comments

 

From the stillness around you a high glassy sound descends, like first light. Each new sound seems to breathe — emerging from and receding back into the stillness — and the glint of bells, like desert plants, here and there. Almost imperceptibly the music swells and continues falling in pitch. From somewhere above — like a gleam of metal, like sunlight emerging from behind a ridgeline — comes the sound of flutes. You are in a strange landscape. You don’t know how to read the weather or the light. You are unsure how long you will be here, or how challenging the journey may be. “This is beautiful,” you think. “But will anything ever happen?”

You resist. Yet the sound draws you in. You resolve to suspend your impatience, to listen as carefully as you can, as if watching a sunrise. You notice your breathing becoming slower. Falling, still falling…The music continues floating upward, growing more and more distant, until at last it dissolves into a deep and resonant stillness.

~ John Luther Adams, from “What It’s Like to Hear the Desert in Music” in   The New York Times, March 23, 2018)

Photo: saoud with Desert

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Lightly Child, Lightly

April 5, 2018 by 21 Comments

patty-maher-first-it-whispers

i enjoy mornings that you wake up to silence

and no one is asking anything of you,

you’re under no pressure to exist…

~ imransuleiman

Notes:

  • Photo: Patty Maher, First it Whispers
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here 
  • 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.”
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Riding Amtrak 2151-2172: Baltimore.

March 31, 2018 by 33 Comments

Five days gone. 4 memories remain. Freeman Dyson’s memory: Unreliable. Selecting. Rearranging. Forgetting. Embroidering. Inventing.

Scene 1: 

My assistant. So grateful to have an assistant. So grateful for her. Two introverts in well plowed furrows. “Are you sure, you want to go there and back same day? 7 hours on train, in 10 hours?” I look up. She knows the answer. There. Back. Exhaustion traded for sleep, sleep in my own bed.  Book it.

I’m waiting on the platform for Amtrak 2151 leaving at 7:54 am to Baltimore. It was for Dickens, and it was for me:  “One of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”

Scene 2:

She boarded at Penn Station. Student. Maybe 20. She’s determined, bangin’ away on an old model MacBook Air. Wireless white earpods pumping in music, she’s bobbing her head. The cover of her notepad: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Biomed? Engineering? Medicine? She snaps the laptop lid shut, turns her head to the window, leans back, closes her eyes and lets the morning sun warm her face. Confident. Ivy leaguer. At peace.

It’s Thursday, three days later, and I’m deep into Irvin Yalom’s Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir. I wouldn’t be caught dead seeking therapy, but this, ‘this’ memoir is well within bounds.  I’m back on the train, Ms. Johns Hopkins sitting across from me, and me, I’m so Irvin Yalom, so wanting to repeat that trip: [Read more…]

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Saturday Morning

March 31, 2018 by 13 Comments

Come to my quietness
I shall cover you with it,
like a white sheet that has blown all day in the sun,
like a mountain lake filled with spring,
it shall slip over you…

~ Diane Di Prima

Notes: Photo & Poem sources unknown

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