I can't sleep…
What happens every day is what’s surprising. The treasure’s never where I look to find it but where I simply look — the sky, the wind, sunrise, a silver arc, the moment’s chance.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “The Everyday (At Kishamish)” in “Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems”
Feather blowing in the wind. Twilight. 5:52 am. April 17, 2024. Cove Island Park. Stamford, CT.
More photos from this morning’s walk here.
3:30 am.
Wally skooches (sp?) up from under the covers and gives me kisses. How does one not smile at this wonderful creature, even this hour. Wally needs to go wee-wee. He races out to the end of the yard, does his business, and comes bolting back, doing a full body shake in flight to shake the cold off — Wally wants no part of what’s outside at this hour. And I can’t blame him.
I shiver, look up, and there’s Moon, in her full glory. I grab the camera and take the shot— best to have something to show for this unexpected Call-of-Wally-Duty at this hour. (Shot here.)
5:30 am.
1,416 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a Row.
Susan reminded me last night that it’s the first day of Spring. I wondered if I forgot to push the clock back a month with the time change. The thermometer reads 29 F°, but there is no way in Hell it’s remotely close to that. Wind gusts up to 25 mph are blowing (I mean BLOWING) off Long Island Sound, and miraculously finding every exposed piece of flesh, which is a miracle in itself given that I’m 4-layered up. Shiver, again.
There are only 4 of us out in the Park this morning, the Regulars, with King Lunatic out front. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Well, mostly true here, except the gloom or sheets of rain can present temporary obstacles.
Continue reading “Walking. Like a Pissant.”
And yet the morning washes everything away… I think, where would humanity be without morning? Even the most violent need is calmed by dawn, and you can almost catch the fresh scent of hope. The day is a child before it ages and it ages very quickly here, making those early hours all the more miraculous.
— Hisham Matar, My Friends: A Novel (Random House, January 9, 2024)
Notes:
“In the dream, a man had cut down our fifty-year-old pistachio tree, Leila’s and my tree. In the dream, we had a pistachio tree. Fifty years old. That alone.
And so we were deciding what to do with this man, what his just punishment should be. I said something stupid about him owing us a year’s pistachio harvest, the cost of the tree. And then Leila said, in English:
“I do not care about the pistachios, Roya jaan. I do not care about the tree. He owes us the fifty years of sun, fifty years of water inside that tree. Fifty years of sun and water. That is the price.”
She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.”
— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)
Notes:
“Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?
And then, if the girl herself was rubbled by an errant mortar shell, her eyes full of tears and aimed in their final living moment at that flower, which would weigh more on the cosmic scales: a tear of gratitude at the great beauty of a flower lifting through ash, or a tear of delirious rage?
It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life. Even the platitudes offered after a tragedy—a divorce, a dead pet—seemed built around the expectation that gratitude was a base level to which you returned after passing through some requisite interval of grief: “In time, you’ll remember only the joy.” People really said that, people who, like Cyrus, could reasonably expect that sufficient training of the spirit would reveal a near-infinite supply of gratitudes hidden in every leaf and sound and mortarless sky.”
— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)
Notes: