That first taste of my end-of-day beer, which is always the moment when the anxiety starts to leach out of me, like sweat cooling on the skin.
— Jo Ann Beard, Festival Days (Little, Brown & Company, March 16, 2021)
Photo: Elevate via Pexels
Tag: Relax
Lightly Child, Lightly
why don’t you read a poem about the sunrise written 5 centuries ago and contemplate the fact that we have been writing about the same sun for centuries upon centuries and then maybe you’ll calm down
— Michael
Notes:
- Photo: DK – 5:25 a.m., April 18, 2022. Sunrise @ Calf Pasture Beach, Norwalk, CT. More photos 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.”
Sunday Afternoon
I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel the silent and invisible life.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: A Novel
Notes: Quote via Mythology of Blue. Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 7:21 am, January 2, 2022. 52° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.
Saturday Morning
Brian Wilson went to bed for three years. Jean-Michel Basquiat would spend all day in bed. Monica Ali, Charles Bukowski, Marcel Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tracey Emin, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Frida Kahlo, William Wordsworth, René Descartes, Mark Twain, Henri Matisse, Kathy Acker, Derek Jarman and Patti Smith all worked or work from bed and they’re productive people. (Am I protesting too much?) Humans take to their beds for all sorts of reasons: because they’re overwhelmed by life, need to rest, think, recover from illness and trauma, because they’re cold, lonely, scared, depressed – sometimes I lie in bed for weeks with a puddle of depression in my sternum – to work, even to protest (Emily Dickinson, John and Yoko). Polar bears spend six months of the year sleeping, dormice too. Half their lives are spent asleep, no one calls them lazy. There’s a region in the South of France, near the Alps, where whole villages used to sleep through the seven months of winter – I might be descended from them. And in 1900, it was recorded that peasants from Pskov in northwest Russia would fall into a deep winter sleep called lotska for half the year: ‘for six whole months out of the twelve to be in the state of Nirvana longed for by Eastern sages, free from the stress of life, from the need to labour, from the multitudinous burdens, anxieties, and vexations of existence’.
— Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened: A Memoir (Faber & Faber Social; May 8, 2018)
Notes: Photo via S L @ gingermias @ Unsplash. Quote via neverneverland
I like Sunday Nights
It’s Sunday. I like Sunday nights, and this particular time always puts me in a good mood…
A transition into Monday, a waiting room.