Notes:
- The Guelta d’Archei is the most famous guelta in the Sahara. (Thank you Horty!)
- Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again
Tag: Photography
Plod. Plod. Plod. It’s not forever. It’s just for right now.
Notes:
- Post Title: Melody Beattie from Short Blog, Long Walk: “I’m grateful. I’m just not sure what for yet. Plod. Plod. Plod. Sometimes that’s what we’ve got to do. It’s not forever. It’s just for right now.“
- Photo by Gleb Garanich (wsj.com September 28, 2018). A monkey performs at a circus in Kiev, Ukraine.
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
Progress
We keep turning one thing into another and calling it progress. We keep machining the beauty off of things as they are, creating more and more things to hide in, as if that will let us live longer. We keep burrowing into everything but ourselves: churning trees into lumber, animals into meat, wind into electricity, vegetables into remedies, and silence into noise; turning the earth, continent by continent, into one giant anthill. We keep eating our way through the arms of the Universe, desperate for something large and quiet to hold us.
~ Mark Nepo, “Short Wisdom on a Long Planet” in Things That Join the Sea and the Sky: Field Notes on Living
Photo: monochrome vibe (via to escape from the commonplaces of existence)
Saturday Morning
But being lonely and being alone are not the same, and Bishop recognized from a young age that there was something special, even salvific, about the latter. “There is a peculiar quality about being alone, an atmosphere that no sounds or persons can ever give,” she wrote in the 1929 essay. “It is as if being with people were the Earth of the mind, the land with its hills and valleys, scent and music: but in being alone, the mind finds its Sea, the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds.” I understood this sentiment well, the special beauty of the blue hours when you are, by choice, alone, and the candle of your self burns in a way it never quite can when you are with someone else…
Yet, as Bishop wrote in 1929, being alone…is unimpeachably special, sacrosanct. The art of being alone, especially in a world where our identities all too often feel coterminous with what we post on social media or achieve publicly and how people react thereto—and where desiring privacy can seem a cause for suspicion—feels increasingly hard to master. But it’s one of the most exquisite, and, to me, most necessary, arts to master, lest we lose too much of ourselves by forgetting—or never knowing—how to be beautifully alone, buoyed by the ocean-music of silence.
~ Gabrielle Bellot, from “Alone with Elizabeth Bishop,” The New York Review of Books (September 20, 2018)
Photo by Marta Bevacqua