And for moments, nothing more.
Some people understand the privilege of stillness and can sit and breathe and look and hear and smell the world turning and let what’s next wait the while.
~ Niall Williams, “This Is Happiness” (Bloomsbury Publishing; December 3, 2019)
Photo: Levas Žiriakovas with Spring Sun
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle…
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
~ Wendell Berry, from “I Go Among Trees and Sit Still” in Sabbaths
Notes:
Poem: Thank you The Hammock Papers. Photo: “Sit a While” by Erik Witsoe (Poznan, Poland, Park Solacki)
Back in my room I located some tubes of Nescafé and a small electric pot. I made my own coffee, wrapped myself in a blanket, opened the sliding doors and sat on the little patio facing the sea. There was a low wall partially obstructing the view, but I had my coffee, could hear the waves and was reasonably content.
~ Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf, September 24, 2019)
Photo: heytess
I sat on my patio, wrapped in a blanket…when I noticed that my room was not on the ground floor but on the subfloor beneath, making it closer to the edge where the beach began…I turned on the radio and Nina Simone was singing I Put a Spell on You. The seals were silent, and I could hear the waves in the distance, winter on the West Coast. I sank into bed and slept heavily.
~ Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf, September 24, 2019)
Photo: Dream Inn Santa Cruz, CA by Angelo DeSantis
Beauty brings us to a halt: it imposes, if only for a flash, the cessation of activity. (On the lawn in front of the library, seeing a runner in red shorts complete the last flailing strides of a sprint before pitching forward, his fingers caressing soft dirt: I let my book fall.) Indolence and aesthetic experience both involve feelings of unbidden influence, involuntariness or absence of will. But where the experience of beauty is often significant and always pleasurable, idleness is more equivocal in its effects and character. Essentially contentless, idleness obtains its phenomenological shape from the objects around us—the pliancy of a chair, the gloss of an advertisement—and the thoughts and desires within us.
O’Connor, to his credit, resists conflating idleness with aesthetic bliss, or animal repose, or other unambiguously positive varieties of passivity. Yet experience without content has little to recommend it. Without some consciously chosen value that organizes how we do nothing, we may find that our idle time makes us less free rather than more.
~ Charlie Tyson, from “Idleness” in The Point (September 5, 2019)
Source: Quote – Thank you The Hammock Papers. Photo: via see more.
Let my words become like a skilled
Potter’s hands,
Quieting,
Smoothing your life
With their knowledge,
Reaching into your tender core
And spreading you out
Like the morning …
~ Hafiz (1315-1390), from “Your Shape of Laughter” in “The Subject Tonight Is Love. 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz”
Photo: katrinauld. Poem via finita–la–commedia
Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment
when, nothing
happens
no what-have-I-to-do-today-list
maybe half a moment
the rush of traffic stops.
The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be
slows to silence,
the white cotton curtains hanging still.
~ Marie Howe, “The Moment” (via Poets.org)
Photo: Eylül Aslan
You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so.
Notes: Quote – Thank you Whiskey River. Photo: Jacqueline Green, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Photo by Richard Calms. (via Mennyfox55)
Leave it alone…
let the bones cool…
~ Lisa Taddeo, Three Women (July 9, 2019)
Notes:
