Notes:
Really Red
April 17, 2019 by 33 Comments
Humanity’s love affair with red lipstick dates back to 3500 B.C. when Queen Shub-Ad of Ur, one of the Sumerian city-states of ancient Mesopotamia, first wore a red lip made with a base of white lead and crushed red rocks…
For years I wore Really Red to make me look like I felt OK. Six years later my collection of lipsticks has expanded, but every shade is red. It’s the color I wear because when I wear it now I actually believe I’m OK, because it’s still the color that gets me, and because on any given day when I catch myself in the mirror with it on, I see the person I want to be. And therein lies the power of red lipstick: its innate ability to be anything at any time for its wearer…
~ Alison Fishburn, from “When Lips Speak for Themselves”
Photo: julia leonidovna with self-portrait
the miraculous, every day in winter, not 15 feet from my window
December 29, 2018 by 41 Comments
To the Editor:
Re “The Solace of Birds in Winter” (Op-Ed, Dec. 15): I am smitten with my backyard birds. What is it about the industrious little souls leaping delicately about my tray feeder that so lifts the spirit? Their spunk? Their equanimity no matter the weather? The variety in their eating habits?
Mourning doves plunk themselves down in the center of the tray to chow down. The red-bellied woodpecker grips the edge and won’t yield his position. The chickadees and nuthatches take a seed each, one at a time, to a nearby branch to nibble.
A chickadee weighs less than half an ounce. Its coat of feathers, half an inch thick, keeps its tiny body at about 90 degrees even when the air temperature is zero. It is this, then, that takes my breath away and is the source of my affection — the miraculous, every day in winter, not 15 feet from my window.
Margaret McGirr
Greenwich, Conn.
New York Times, Letters, December 17, 2018
Photo: Project Feeder Watch titled “See Red” by Stephen & Judy Shelasky, Longmeadow, MA. 4 male Cardinals, a Red-bellied Woodpecker and a little sparrow checking out a female Cardinal as she flies into view.
T.G.I.F. (from another seat)
April 27, 2018 by 11 Comments
A migrant, part of a group intercepted aboard two dinghies in the Mediterranean Sea, rests after arriving at the port of Malaga, Spain. (Jon Nazca, Reuters, wsj.com, April 26, 2018)
Today’s Forecast
April 4, 2017 by 9 Comments
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like…
November 23, 2016 by 9 Comments
100,000 poinsettias are ready to be dispatched for the Christmas season in a Loanhead, Scotland garden center. (November 18, 2016. Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Don’t other fantastic shots here: Prepping the Poinsettias for Christmas
Saturday Morning
October 8, 2016 by 18 Comments
…
Let the eye enlarge
with all it beholds.
I want to celebrate color,
how one red leaf flickers
like a match held to a dry branch,
and the whole world goes up
in orange and gold.
~ Linda Pastan, from “Autumn” in Carnival Evening, New & Selected Poems 1968-1998
Notes: Poem Source: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: via The Sensual Starfish
Miracle. All of it.
August 19, 2016 by 26 Comments
Picture yourself in an airliner, at high altitude. One of the plane engines has just caught fire, the other doesn’t look very well either, and the pilot has to make an emergency landing. Finding yourself in such a situation can be a shattering, yet also a revealing experience. First, there are of course the cries, the tears, the whispered prayers, the loud hysterics. Amid all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you cannot think of anything in any detached, rational fashion. For you have to admit it, you are scared to death, just like everyone else. Yet the plane lands safely and everybody gets off unharmed. After you’ve had a chance to pull yourself together, you start thinking a bit more clearly about what just happened.
That’s when we might realise, for example, how close we can be sometimes to not being at all. And also that there is something oppressively materialistic, to an almost obscene degree, in any ‘brush with death’. Some faulty piece of equipment – a worn-out part, a loose screw, a leaking pipe, anything – could be enough to do us in. That’s all it takes. We thus realise that, when we experience failure, we start seeing the cracks in the fabric of existence, and the nothingness that stares at us from the other side. Yet even as failure pushes us towards the margins of existence it gives us the chance to look at everything – at the world, at ourselves, at what we value most – with fresh eyes. The failure of things, coming as it does with a certain measure of existential threat, exposes us for what we are. And what a sight!
From that unique location – the site of devastation that we’ve become – we understand that we are no grander than the rest of the world. Indeed, we are less than most things. The smallest stone we pick up randomly from a riverbed has long preceded us, and will outlive us. Humans are barely existing entities: how can we claim privileges? Fundamentally, we are vulnerable, fragile creatures. And if, unlike the rest of existence, people are endowed with reason, it is this gift of reason that should lead us to understand how modest our place in the cosmos actually is.
~ Costica Bradatan, Everyone fails, but only the wise find humility
Notes:
- Photo: Celine Bissat Makeup Artist and Photography with “Red Powder” (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
- Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
- Related Live & Live Posts: Miracle. All of it.
How?
July 1, 2016 by 31 Comments
This morning it rained.
This afternoon it is sunny.
How is that not like the mind?
~ Michael Kewley, May all beings be happy
Sources: Quote – Some of my best friends are birds. Photo: Your Eyes Blaze Out
Orlando. Pulse. I’m not seeing it either.
June 14, 2016 by 23 Comments
I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Notes:
- Quote: Thank you The Vale of Soul-Making
- photo:”don’t look back” by margherita loba via Sensual Starfish
It’s been a long day
March 16, 2016 by 16 Comments
[…]
But remember that you have to move on,
somehow.
You just pick your head up
and stare at something beautiful
like the sky or the ocean,
and
you move the hell on.
— James Patterson, Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas.
Notes:
- Quote: The Vale of Soul Making. Photo: Elif Sanem Karakoç with Seconds
- Related Posts: “It’s Been a Long Day“
The Heart
March 12, 2016 by 14 Comments
It’s 4 a.m. Zeke’s asleep on my right, his front legs are stiff armed, fully extended and laying on my chest. No, on my Heart. But for his breathing, I could be laying in bed in the “world’s quietest room“, so completely quiet that I can hear my own organs pumping. The hypnotic page-turning ride continued:
“She paces the room. If this is a donation, it’s a pretty unusual one, she thinks. There is no donor in this operation— no one intended to make a donation— and likewise there is no donee, because she is not in a position to refuse the organ: she has to accept it if she wants to survive. So what is it exactly? The recycling of an organ that can still be used, can still fulfill its function as a pump? She begins to undress, sitting on the bed: she removes her boots, her socks. The meaning of this transfer, for which she was selected by an incredible alignment of coincidences— the almost perfect compatibility of her blood and her genetic code with those of someone who died today— all of this becomes hazy. She does not like this feeling of unearned privilege; this lottery, it’s like winning a little stuffed animal snagged by the metal claw from a jumble of toys piled behind glass in one of those arcade games. Worst of all is that she will never be able to say thank you; that is the crux of the matter. It’s simply impossible. Thank you— that radiant phrase— will fall into the void. She will never be able to express any kind of gratitude to the donor or the donor’s family, never mind offer a gift in return in order to free herself from this infinite debt, and the idea that she will be permanently trapped crosses her mind. The floor is ice-cold under her feet. She is afraid. Her whole being flinches…
She hopes that she will be able to kiss her sons before she puts on this tissue-paper gown that flutters without covering her up, making her feel as if she is naked in a breeze. Her eyes remain dry, but she is struggling to get her head around the enormity of what she is about to go through. Placing her hand there, between her breasts, she feels her pulse, still slightly too fast in spite of the medication, still somewhat unpredictable too, and says its name out loud: heart.”
~ Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart: A Novel
I’m done but it won’t be done with me – ever – an unforgettable story.
Notes:
- NY Times book review: ‘The Heart,’ by Maylis de Kerangal.
- Find the book on Amazon here: The Heart, A Novel.
- Photo: mennyfox55
- Related posts: Maylis de Kerangal
A hundred thousand times a day. 10 pints a minute.
March 8, 2016 by 14 Comments
The thing about Simon Limbres’s heart, this human heart, is that, since the moment of his birth, when its rhythm accelerated, as did the other hearts around it, in celebration of the event, the thing is, that this heart, which made him jump, vomit, grow, dance lightly like a feather or weigh heavy as a stone, which made him dizzy with exhilaration and made him melt with love, which filtered, recorded, archived — the black box of a twenty-year-old body — the thing is that nobody really knows it; only a moving image created by ultrasound could echo its sound and shape, could make visible the joy that dilates it and the sadness that tightens it; only the paper trace of an electrocardiogram, set in motion at the very beginning, could draw the shape, describe the exertion, the quickening emotion, the prodigious energy needed to contract almost a hundred thousand times a day, to pump nearly ten pints of blood every minute, yes, only that graph could tell a story, by outlining the life of ebbs and flows, of gates and valves, a life of beats — for, while Simon Limbres’s heart, this human heart, is too much even for the machines, no one could claim to really know it, and that night, that starless and bone-splittingly cold night on the estuary and in the Pays de Caux, as a lightless swell rolled all along the cliffs, as the continental shelf retreated, revealing its geological bands, there could be heard the regular rhythm of a resting organ, a muscle that was slowly recharging, a pulse of probably less than fifty beats per minute, and a cell-phone alarm went off at the foot of a narrow bed, the echo of a sonar signal translated into luminescent digits on the touchscreen — 05:50 — and suddenly everything raced out of control.
~ Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016)
Photo: RedF by Nam Le Hoang, Vietnam
fireflies in the blood
March 4, 2016 by 7 Comments
Like the first time I ever saw a cardinal,
brilliant flash of red against the gray
of the English room, your voice clapped
against the windows;
signal: fireflies in the blood.
[…]
—Aracelis Girmay, “English Class” (for Anthony)
Credits: Poem – Who are you really, wanderer?. Photo: Delightful
That one. The quiet healing road.
January 23, 2016 by 17 Comments
I am torn between two ways to handle this doldrum that has been going on for weeks, really since January, when I did at least get down a few small poems. The first way is to give in, to enjoy the light on flowers— yesterday white daffodils and white iris in the dusk— to enjoy this beautiful place, rejoice in the animal presences (Bramble at last comes up here to my study and curls up on the daybed…), to live the slow quiet rhythm of a day as a kind of healing. The other way is to ask a great deal more of myself, to drive myself, and hope to break through into deeper, more valid places.
~ May Sarton, Tuesday, March 9th. The House by the Sea: A Journal
Notes:
- Image via Mennyfox55
- Related posts: May Sarton
- Inspired by Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” – […] I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.
Time to pull in the boundaries and lift the drawbridge
January 10, 2016 by 18 Comments
It’s a season when one gets spread out almost too thin in too many human directions, but come January first I am determined to batten myself down, tighten up, go inward. I feel the day must be marked by a change of rhythm, by some quiet act of self-determination and self-assertion. Everyone earns such a day after the outpourings of Christmas. We are overextended. Time to pull in the boundaries and lift the drawbridge.
~ May Sarton, The House by the Sea: A Journal
Notes:
- Illustration: Roberta Zeta, Helsinki, Finland (via Exercice de Style)
- Related posts: May Sarton
I just don’t see the connection
November 22, 2015 by 12 Comments
Once he heard the gunfire stop, Matthieu made his way back to the restaurant. “I saw a lot of women dead on the ground,” he said, his voice catching on the “f” of “femmes.” “It was mostly women that I saw.” He found one of his friends, a Brazilian studying in Paris, lying in the middle of the street. She had been seated across from him, and was shot in the chest. Matthieu sat on the ground and held her legs, feeling her shallow breathing. She would survive.
People were running through the streets in an eruption of panic, shouting as the police arrived and tried to establish order. The scene couldn’t be secured; Matthieu worried that the shooters might return. Next to him, a man without injuries held his girlfriend’s lifeless body in his arms. Then, without warning, he ran off. The woman was about twenty-five and very beautiful. Matthieu searched for words to describe her perfect, uncanny stillness. […]
Last week’s victims were normal people doing normal Parisian things: eating and drinking together, going out at night to hear a concert or watch a soccer game. After a few days, the rhythm of Parisian life returned, but a new fatalism hung in the air. People seemed resigned to the idea that more attacks would happen, maybe soon. […]
I remembered that when Matthieu and I first met we’d discussed our upbringings, and religion had come up. His family was Catholic, but I couldn’t remember if he was religious. “I’m more agnostic than Catholic, though I come from the Catholic culture,” he said. “In any case, this isn’t really a moment when I’m thinking about religion. When I think about religion, I always think about it in connection with what’s beautiful, what’s good. But never in connection with evil. I just don’t see the connection.”
~ Alexandra Schwartz, Letter from Paris: The Long Night. Terrorist attacks and a city changed.
Illustration: Arc De Triomphe by Christoph Niemann in The New Yorker
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