She likes it best when everything is very, very quiet.
~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel” (W. W. Norton & Company, January 15, 2019)
Saturday Morning
January 12, 2019 by 12 Comments
It is time to just go into a cocoon
and spin your soul.
~ Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel
Photo: Chelsea
Saturday Morning
October 13, 2018 by 22 Comments
I will cut adrift—
I will sit on pavements & drink coffee—
I will dream;
I will take my mind out of its iron cage & let it swim—this fine October.
— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry c. Wednesday, October 15, 1927
Photo via 8tracks.com
Saturday Morning
October 6, 2018 by 22 Comments
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us…breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little.
~Denise Levertov, from “Sojourns in the Parallel World” in The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov
Notes: Poem from Make Believe Boutique; Photo by Coleman Guyon
Everything I touch, is born.
August 25, 2018 by 15 Comments
Notes:
- Post Title: Clarice Lispector, from “Brasilia; Splendor” in The Complete Stories
- Photo Gif Source: gajo1987 (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
Saturday
August 4, 2018 by 10 Comments
Notes:
- Inspired by: “We walked at the edge of the sea, the dog, still young then, running ahead of us. Few people. Gulls. A flock of pelicans circled beyond the swells, then closed their wings and dropped head-long into the dazzle of light and sea. You clapped your hands; the day grew brilliant. Later we sat at a small table with wine and food that tasted of the sea. A perfect day, we said to one another…” ~ Peter Everwine, from “The Day” in Listening Long and Late (via Memory’s Landscape)
- Photographs: Françoise Dufau (France). Photo 1: L’Estuaire (The Estuary). Photo 2: La Dune Du Pilat (The Dune of Pilat). Photo 3: Au-Dessus Des Nuages (Over the Clouds)
Saturday Morning
June 2, 2018 by 13 Comments
A cluster of seals rises behind the skiff when I idle away from Peril Island. I feel as if they’re ushering me off, and as if the other animals are watching with relief while I depart: the seals stretched out on warm rocks; the blinking oystercatchers; the fretting gulls and shorebirds; the eagle who flew when I arrived; the peregrine, perched in some distant tree or soaring invisibly against the sun’s corona. I can almost sense the whole place breathing out as its tranquility returns. My deepest impression is that Peril Island and its animals belong to one another, and that there is no rightful place among them for humans.
~ Richard Nelson, The Island Within
Notes: Photo Credit: conservationaction.com. Related Posts: “Richard Nelson”, The Island Within
Saturday Morning
May 19, 2018 by 10 Comments
Many an hour I spent there lying in the grass; it was so quiet and mysterious—the only voices were those of the leaves and the birds. But I never saw the place clothed in such beauty as I did that spring. Like me, the bees had already gone out into the meadow, and now they wove and hummed in and out of the myriad violet flowers which burst open in a blue lustre from grass and moss. I gathered them and filled my pocket handkerchief; it was as if I was enchanted, in the midst of the fragrance and sunlight.
– Theodor Storm, (1817-1888) from A Quiet Musician, The Lake of the Bees
Notes: Quote via a-quiet-green-agreement. Photo: Chris A with Field.Always ( Ain, Rhone-Alpes, France)
Saturday Morning
May 12, 2018 by 30 Comments
To rise early, reconsider, rise again later
to papers and the news…
Another day of what we bring to it-
matters unfinished from days before,
regret over matters we’ve finished poorly.
Just once you’d like to start out early,
free from memory and lighter for it…
nothing
to shrink from, nothing to shirk,
no lot to carry that wasn’t by choice.
And at night, no voice to keep him awake,
no hurry to rise, no hurry not to.
~ Tracy K. Smith, from “The Ordinary Life”
- Photo: Your Eyes Blaze Out
- Post inspired by:
He sees that this emptiness of self—that this alone—makes a life worth living, a life worth writing. He has been rinsed of ambition, of pride in himself, rinsed of shame over his failures, emptied of his grudges. He has even let go of time, of history—the sources of our regret, our sense that we have done it all wrong. Once reality has stabbed you in the heart like this, you are indeed free—or, when that sweet pain does leave you …the realization remains, a sure memory. This realization, not your ego, is your true self. Alone, outside time, but paradoxically within the moment. There he is, a poet suspended on planet earth in that most ephemeral piece of furniture, the hammock, swinging in the eternity of the moment, and he is empty of himself—at last. The whole world rushes in.
~ Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day (Penguin Publishing Group. April 17, 2018)
