Let me begin again as a speck
of dust caught in the night winds
sweeping out to sea. Let me begin
this time knowing the world…
is grinding and sighing all night,
and dawn comes slowly…
— Philip Levine, from “Let Me Begin Again,” 7 Years from Somewhere: Poems
Source: Mennyfox55
Time and again I was seeing that if I could handle the winds of the current storm, they would end up blowing in some great gift … Challenging situations create the force needed to bring about change. The problem is that we generally use all the stirred up energy intended to bring about change, to resist change. I was learning to sit quietly in the midst of the howling winds and wait to see what constructing action was being asked of me.
– Michael Singer, from The Surrender Project
Notes:
– You know what I like to hear most?
– What?
– Solid quiet. Perfect unbroken quiet.
– Tennessee Williams, from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”
Photo: Anna Heimkreiter Photography with Give It Time. Quote: Violent Waves of Emotion
And we want to live right where black oaks lived,
Once very quietly and still…
Because we are imperfect and love so
Deeply we will never have enough days,
We need the gift of starting over, beginning
Again: just this constant good, this
Saving hope.
~ Nancy Shaffer, from Because We Spill Not Only Milk from Instructions in Joy
Notes – Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: Franz Wallner with Black Oak
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:
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.
Notes: Quote – Thank you Make Believe Boutique. Photo: Franziska Korries (via Newthom)
5:40 am train.
Full. How can this be possible?
I stand in the vestibule, irritated, and then remember that the 5:40 am train is a Peak train, and further remember that I’m paying a Peak Fare rate to Stand. Irritated.
I set my bag down on the muddy floor, irritated, and wait, hoping for someone to get off at the one and only stop on the express train to Grand Central.
I see a commuter to my right zipping up his backpack. I grab my briefcase, block the aisle (and the commuter who is waiting on the other side of the vestibule) and grab the open seat. Commuter code: You snooze, you lose. Smiling. I’ve become a New Yorker.
I pull down the bench, a handicapped seat which flips up. There’s an awkward shifting of knees and legs to avoid all contact. There will be no man-touching.
Two men across from me. Two men to my right. And me.
The train car is silent but for the rocking of the car on rails.
We pull into Grand Central and exit without an acknowledgement of the other.
4 head right. I head left.
I walk alone, down the tunnels, with the sound of my footfall on concrete and with Patricia Hampl (again).
“There may be no more solitary location in America than a New York subway—take a look at the faces of those commuters, their heads bent to their open books like monks at their breviaries, little glowing screens casting an otherworldly aura onto their intent faces. They are elsewhere. They are alone. Alone with words as much as any writer at a notebook or screen.”
Notes:
If you are very very quiet
you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
~ Raul Gutierrez, from “Lies I’ve told my three year old recently”
Notes:
Theirs was then and remains even more today the stranger passion, the one little understood—or even comprehended as passion. Not erotic life, but the pleasure of the mind filling like the lower chamber of an hourglass with the slow-moving grains of a perfect day—sky, carnations, walking, reading, writing, Toasted Cheese, the presence of another who wishes to be so still, so silent too… It is possible to feel the fact of being alive as it breathes in, breathes out. It’s a life. It’s the life.
~ Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day (Published April 17, 2018)
Image: (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
This morning. (And not Fake News, mostly.)
Sleep in till 7:45 am. Wow. Let’s do that again, and again, and again.
Read the morning papers. Read a few chapters of Patricia Hampl’s new book: The Art of the Wasted Day. And commit to workin’ on this Art today.
A heaping breakfast. Two-egg ham and cheese omelette. Bacon. Pork sausage links. Fresh cut fruit. Fresh baked pastries. And that would be plural on the pastries x 2. These same pastries were dipped in home made strawberry jam.
A short walk to the beach. Me and my breakfast hangover land heavily on the beach chair.
81º F. Partly sunny. (Feels like 92 F.) Warm winds @ 7 mph from the NE.
Miles of soft sand in both directions.
The Atlantic laps the shoreline.
Wispy clouds provide intermittent relief from the sun.
Out in the distance, hulking ocean freighters and their giant steel containers carry their cargo to ports away.
Pelicans, with their massive wing spans and beaks, cruise three feet off the ocean top, and plummet, splashing in search of breakfast. And they come again, and again and again — feeding. I look closely for a wing flap wondering how the maintain their locomotion. Can’t see it. Miracle. All of it.
Paragliders float up high, held aloft by giant multicolored rainbow parachutes. Muffled sounds of jet skis in the distance.
Families and beach goers begin to arrive. Hundreds and hundreds fill the shoreline quietly and peacefully milling, settling, reading, playing, sleeping… children pull out their plastic shovels and pails out of Mom’s beach bag and start building castles…
My toes auger into the soft sand, dark and cool a few inches down.
And, oh yea, there’s a little of something else.
