By Histoire d’Elle (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
Now Raise Your Hand and Caim…
May 18, 2021 by 18 Comments
Lightly Child, Lightly.
November 27, 2020 by 39 Comments
Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.
— Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (Vintage; July 8, 2003)
Notes:
- Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
Photo: DK @Daybreak. November 27, 2020. 7:05 am. 45° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford CT - 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.”
Thanksgiving Morning
November 26, 2020 by 25 Comments
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Photo: DK, home, Thanksgiving Day, Nov 26, 2020. 55° & Rain.
none of us can bear too much reality
August 28, 2020 by 51 Comments
Thinking about swifts has made me think more carefully about the ways in which I’ve dealt with difficulty. When I was small I comforted myself with thoughts of layers of rising air; later I hid myself among the whispers of recorded works of fiction. We all have our defences. Some of them are self-defeating, but others are occasions for joy: the absorption of a hobby, the writing of a poem, speeding on a Harley, the slow assembly of a collection of records or seaside shells. ‘The best thing for being sad,’ said T. H. White’s Merlin, ‘is to learn something.’ All of us have to live our lives most of the time inside the protective structures that we have built; none of us can bear too much reality. We need our books, our craft projects, our dogs and knitting, our movies, gardens and gigs. It’s who we are. We’re held together by our lives, our interests, and all our chosen comforts. But we can’t have only those things, because then we can’t work out where we should be headed.
— Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (Grove Press, August 25, 2020)
Photo Salvi Danes, (Barcelona) (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
Thanksgiving morn. House full of sleepers.
November 28, 2019 by 55 Comments
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes: Photo: Mennyfox55
I love the dawn stillness (on Thanksgiving Day)
November 22, 2018 by 35 Comments
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes: Photo: Mennyfox55
Elle est bonne
August 26, 2017 by 7 Comments
On the Mediterranean beaches of France, in summer, you hear one cry repeated endlessly: Elle est bonne. That is, It’s good. Meaning the seawater. Cautious, modern inhabitants of cities thus assure one another that it’s safe to go in the water, they won’t be stunned by its arctic cold. But in its essence this cry affirms the world, nature. Elle est bonne.
~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration: An Essay (April 4, 2017)
Photo: South of France via Oliver’s Travels. Related Posts: Adam Zagajewski
Thanksgiving morn. House full of sleepers.
November 24, 2016 by 16 Comments
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes: Photo: Mennyfox55
Saturday Morning
March 19, 2016 by 21 Comments
Why does the sound of rain gently tapping on the roof and windows instantly relieve stress?
It is a reminder of survival, an appreciation for being safe, dry, and warm, the most basic of needs.
Therein lies a secret to contentment; to remind ourselves regularly of the satisfaction of our basic needs, to appreciate another moment of survival, and forget the extraneous factors that cause us undue stress.
Image: Frank Telli Blog
Thanksgiving at dawn. House full of sleepers.
November 26, 2015 by 10 Comments
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes:
- Photo: Pretty Thoughts
- Related posts: Katrina Kenison
Quiet has many moods
October 4, 2015 by 15 Comments
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected. But those days are the exception now, not the norm.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes:
- Photo: Zsaj with Morning, Sleep In
- Related posts: Katrina Kenison
Querencia: where one feels safe, a place where one feels at home.
August 22, 2015 by 16 Comments
As for the querencia,
we all have a place where we feel safest,
even if it is only the idea of a place,
maybe an idea by itself,
the place that all our being radiates out from,
like an idea of friendship or justice
or perhaps something simpler
like the memory of a back porch
where we laughed a low
and how the setting sun
through the pine trees shone on the green chairs,
flickered off the ice cubes in our glasses.
~ Stephen Dobyns, from “Querencia,” Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992
Notes:
- Stephen Dobyns Bio: Poetry Foundation
- Querencia definition: wiki.
- Poem Source: Memory’s Landscape
- Photo Source: MennyFox55
Live & Learn 