Tag: Spring

If this isn’t nice, what is?

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My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

— Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories Press, 2005)

Notes:

  • “If this isn’t nice, what is?” DK Photo: Baby Robins. 1pm. June 1, 2025. Stamford, CT. Thank you Barry and Cara Denison for sharing your beautiful finding.
  • Quote: Thank you The Hammock Papers

Light Child, Lightly.

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I want to talk about happiness and well-being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world. I want to talk about the early June weather, about harmony and blissful repose, about robins and yellow finches and bluebirds darting past the green leaves of trees.

I want to talk about the benefits of sleep, about the pleasures of food and alcohol, about what happens to your mind when you step into the light of the two o’clock sun and feel the warm embrace of air around your body.

— Paul Auster, (1947-2024) from “The Brooklyn Follies“

Notes:

  • Thursday Posts inspired by 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.
  • Portrait: The Guardian

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother’s hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

— May Sarton, “An Observation” in “A Private Mythology: Poems.” (W.W. Norton & Co. in 1996)

Notes: Poem via Exhaled-Spirals. Photo via Pexels by Karolina Grabowska.

Wally’s Great Adventures (61 – VOLUME UP – I Can See Clearly Now)

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hello friends, wally here.  beautiful day in connecticut today. like almost the first day of spring, 61 °F and toasty warm.  sunshiny day with exception of dad (a large dark cloud) who started his ‘eliminate all sugar from his diet” day after his doctor visit…he mumbled something about total bullsh*t, and don’t eat margarine, don’t eat salt, wrong, wrong, and now no sugar. to distract him, we decided to haul the outdoor furniture from the basement to the backyard. i helped a lot, dad said, by staying the h*ll out of the way. i’ve never had a spring day in my short puppy life, but if this is what’s to come, wow, wally is pumped. have a great sunday.  Wally.

No Argentine. No Mountains. No Cows. But May. And oh, so Green.

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Later, when I was in the Argentine, I used to tell myself that I could not die until I had seen another month of May, here in the mountains. The grass grows knee-high in the meadows and down the centre of the roads between the wheel ruts. If you are with a friend, you walk down the road with the grass between you. In the forest the late beech leaves come out, the greenest leaves in the world. The cows are let out of the stable for the first time. They leap, kick with their hind legs, turn in circles, jump like goats. The month itself is like a homecoming.

Notes:

  • Photos: Green @ Daybreak.  5:15 to 5:35 am, May 18, 2022. 53° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.  See more pictures from my walk here.   
  • Quote: Thank you Whiskey River