It’s been a long day

hair-pony-tails-bird

Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

~ Mary Ruefle, Remarks on Letters from Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures


Notes:

Guess.What.Day.It.Is?

camel-dust-storm-hump-day-wednesday


Notes:

  • Photo: Steve McCurry with Camels in Dust Storm, Jaisaimer, India, 2010
  • Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again

through bone and rain and everything

hold,black and white

On a spring day in 1950, when I was big enough to run about on my own two legs yet still small enough to ride in my father’s arms, he carried me onto the porch of a farmhouse in Tennessee and held me against his chest, humming, while thunder roared and lightning flared and rain sizzled around us. On a spring day just over twenty years later, I carried my own child onto the porch of a house in Indiana to meet a thunderstorm, and then, after thirty more years, I did the same with my first grandchild. Murmuring tunes my father had sung to me, I held each baby close, my daughter, Eva, and then, a generation later, her daughter, Elizabeth, and while I studied the baby’s newly opened eyes I wondered if she felt what I had felt as a child cradled on the edge of a storm— the tingle of a power that surges through bone and rain and everything.

~ Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe


Image: Suzanne with a Little Part of You

 

Guess.What.Day.It.Is?

camel-hump-day-wednesday


Notes:

What I feel is scarcely a twitch

photography

I try to imagine the entire force of this storm flinging itself onto a thousand miles of Pacific coast, the multitude of gusts rolling over the land during every second of its passage, the combined power and noise and energy felt only by the continent itself. Listening to a single gust billow through the timber, I realize that what I feel is scarcely a twitch in the larger scale of things, like the swirl from one stroke of a bird’s wing.

~ Richard Nelson, The Island Within


Image: Endlesspetrichor