Tag: still

Saturday Morning

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Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind.
Air that flowers held
for awhile…
So these moments count for a lot—peace, you know.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up.
Cool, cool minutes.
No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
This is what the whole thing is about.

—William Stafford, from “Just Thinking” in Allegiances

Notes:

  • Poem Source, thank you Beth via Alive on All Channels
  • DK Photo @ 5:15am today @ Cove Island Park.  More pictures from this morning’s walk here.

Truth.

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Photo: Michael Odelberth (via Unsplash)

Saturday Morning

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Thank you Rob @ The Hammock Papers (via Treadwells Bookshop)

 

Sea of Tranquility: A beat. A sip of water. Pacing is everything.

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While (he) slips immediately into the same stasis that overcame him… It isn’t quite listlessness. He makes a careful inventory of his thoughts and decides that he isn’t unhappy. He just desires no further movement, for the time being. If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.

—  Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility: A Novel (Knopf, April 5, 2022)

Notes:

  • Highly recommended.  Let’s just describe this as a Wow. (And if you can listen to book on Audible, a real plus. Excellent narration.)
  • NY Times Book Review: A Dazzling New Foray into Speculative Fiction From Emily St. John Mandel – “In Sea of Tranquility,” Mandel takes up existential questions of time and being…In “Sea of Tranquility,” Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and her ability to project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart. As in Ishiguro, this is not born of some cheap, made-for-television, faux-emotional gimmick or mechanism, but of empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this “green-and-blue world” and who one day might live well beyond.“
  • Image via CBC

Sunday Morning

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My spirituality has always been given to contemplation, even before anyone articulated for me exactly what “the contemplative” was. I was not raised in an overtly religious home; my spiritual formation now comes to me in memories—not creeds or doctrine, but the air we breathed, stories, myth, and a kind of attentiveness. From a young age, my siblings and I were allowed to travel deep into our interior worlds to become aware of ourselves, our loves, our beliefs. And still, my father demanded an unflinching awareness of our exterior worlds. Where is home from here? What was the waitress’s name? Where do we look when we’re walking? If a single phrase could be considered the mantra of our family, it would be Pay attention.

—  Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (Convergent Books, February 22, 2022)