Tag: Spiritual

Walking. With Ennui.

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5:25 a.m. Here we go again. 849 consecutive (almost) days on my Daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

I gather my camera gear, sleep walking through the ritual now. Insomnia rages, 6 days running. No, I haven’t taken your suggested witches’ potions — that is, banana before bed, tonic water, melatonin, magnesium, and all that other voodoo shit that I can’t seem to even try. What’s the definition of insanity? Doing the same shit over and over again and expecting a different result. Well, here we are. On the 5:30 am Insanity Bus to Cove Island Park.

I get out of the car. I reposition the pack on my back, then the camera, all of it, heavy, unsettled, unsettling.

I walk.

I’m woozy, stewing in a brew of vertigo and fatigue. Brew…Brew…feelings brewing. I’m at the opening of Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: “Feeling brews itself in different locations, depending on the body. A man’s most honest impulses may begin in his hands or his heart, his toes, throat, fingers or thighs. Lia felt most things first in her stomach.” There’s nothing spectacular going on in this body right now. Spent immediately comes to mind. I slow my pace to get a grip.

I walk.

Mortimer goes on to use the word “ennui“, a Lori-word. I had to look it up…a feeling of utter weariness and discontent…world-weary sensation…soul-destroying fiend.”

I walk.

Adding to the ennui is an “off day” for photo taking. We’ve got the 3 impeding elements: (1) No cloud cover of any type. (2) High tide and (3) Humans. With sun rising later, the tourists are out. In force.

I walk.

I turn off the shoreline, finding nothing enlightening, and move to the walk path.

Man, tourist, adult, not a regular at Cheers here on the Daybreak walks, approaches. He’s shouting into the speaker of his smartphone. He’s FaceTiming. The participant on the other side of the call shouts back. And the back and forth continues, shattering the silence of daybreak.

I move left on the path directly in his lane, thinking this may jog him in lifting the receiver to his ear, or better yet, ending the call. No such thing happens. He shifts to the other side of the path to avoid me. I glare at him, he smiles back and continues his conversation. Idiot, oblivious to the world around him.

My irritation bleeds off, and I walk.

Continue reading “Walking. With Ennui.” →

Walking. With Buechner.

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5:10 a.m. No. I didn’t sleep in. And No, I didn’t take magnesium before bed. Or drink a cup of Tonic Water. Or eat a banana. Or take melatonin. Why? Who the Hell knows? Maybe it gives me something to bitch about.

I walk.

It been 837 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. That’s 2 years, 3 months, 15 days, like in a row.

There’s a thin sheen of cloud cover over the moon. Even God found at Ōita couldn’t get a clear shot at this. Elsewhere overhead, the cloud cover is heavy and near complete. It’s dark.

It feels like a “down” day. Too much cloud. Too many people. Too much high tide. Sigh. 837 days, and you’re going to have an off day. The odds are such.

I approach the location in the photograph up top. A scene that I, and you, have seen many times.

I can make out the fisherman’s silhouette, but nothing else. Something pulls me to lift the camera up and look through the viewfinder…WTH is that? I stare through the viewfinder, a Kaleidoscope.

I take the camera away and look out again. It’s dark. I see nothing of what I see in the viewfinder. I lift the camera, and do over. God, no. It can’t be my eyes deteriorating further.

I lift the camera again, and sure as sh*t, it’s there. God found at Ōita has returned. The pink hue watercolors are airbrushed on the water, the sky, the low hanging clouds and the horizon.

It’s dark, and yet it’s not. What I see. What I want to see. What I can see. What I don’t see. What I feel.

This string of babble pulls me back to my early morning papers.

Frederick Buechner died this week. David Brooks, in his must-read essay titled “The Man Who Found His Inner Depths” described Buechner’s faith as “personal, unpretentious and accessible. ‘Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward.’ It is sensing a presence, not buying an argument.”

I look over the Cove, it’s lighter out now, twilight is lifting. Now that I see, I believe.

But damn it if I’m not sensing Something out there.

Something ethereal, Lori’s magic word def. adj. //əˈTHirēəl/ extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world.

No, this brick-head isn’t buying ‘jack’ yet, but he’s out Shopping, and Something is there.

He can feel it.

DK Photo @ 5:30 a.m. August 20, 2022. 8-° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.

Sunday Morning

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Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.

– Mary Oliver, Winter Hours in “Upstream: Selected Essays”

Notes:

  • There are moments, few moments, during my daybreak walks, when I can feel this spiritual side of the world that I don’t believe in. And this photo was one of those moments —  Feb 2 — Ground Hog Day —  Hump Day —  Something-bigger-than-it-all Day.
  • Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 6:36 am, Feb 2, 2022. 30° F, feels like 27° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
  • Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels

Sunday Morning

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Wassily Kandinsky wrote that “Cézanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate. He painted these things as he painted human beings, because he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything. . . . A man, a tree, an apple, all were used by Cézanne in the creation of something that is called a ‘picture,’ and which is a piece of true inward and artistic harmony.” The artist or writer does not impose harmony on reality but—with sufficient reverence and diligence and selflessness and solitude—uncovers the harmony that is always there but that we conceal from ourselves out of a preference for material comfort and fear of the consequences a full and unreserved embrace of harmony requires.

This faith in the underlying harmony roots itself in a love of and appreciation for nature, because nature, no matter how extreme the human abuse heaped on her, embodies a quiet, continual knitting and healing of life, ever dependent on death to make herself anew. “Art is a harmony parallel to nature,” Cézanne wrote—not identical with but parallel to nature. Art of any kind, undertaken with attention and focus and as part of a commitment to discipline, is an effort at reenactment of the original creative gesture—the precipitation of the universe at the moment of its creation. That, I believe, is why we sing, paint, dance, sculpt, write; that is why any one of us sets out to create something from nothing, and why the creative impulse is essentially religious or, if you prefer, spiritual. We seek to recreate the original creative gesture, whatever or whoever set it in motion—the bringing into being of what is. We seek the center of beauty.”

 — Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life (W. W. Norton & Company, March 10, 2020)

Notes: Paul Cezanne’s “Fruit and Jug on a Table (1890-1894)

Lightly child, lightly.

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‘What did you mean by saying that you were psychic?’

‘What did you think I meant?’

‘Spiritualism?’ ‘Infantilism.’ ‘That’s what I think.’

‘Of course.’

I could just make out his face in the light from the doorway. He could see more of mine, because I had swung round during that last exchange. ‘You haven’t really answered my question.’

‘Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. You are like a porcupine. When that animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body.’

~ John Fowles, The Magus

Notes:

  • Photo: A porcupine curls up in a garden outside of Moscow on Wednesday. (Yuri Kadobnov, Agence France, September 21, 2017)
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Series 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.
  • Today, this post was inspired by LouAnn: What About Us?