It was always here, like a secret door you’ve been trying to kick in for years.
And then, in the midst of this trial, as you hang your head in defeat, you notice that around your neck you are wearing a key.
— Jillian Horton, We Are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing (HarperCollins Publishers, February 23, 2021)
Notes: Image: Daryn Stumbaugh via Unsplash
He points to those with hidden symptoms in a chapter reflecting on the deaths of Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade and Alan Krueger. There is mental and physical agony in this life, and Bruni does not judge anyone’s decisions; rather, he grieves the losses and appreciates the grace. There is virtue in stoicism, but there is also danger in what strong people can hide. His own situation has made him even more keen to understand the other whose public face contradicts a private suffering. He proposes that each person should have a sandwich board listing her pain and how she adapts: “Imagine that our hardships, our hurdles, our demons, our pain were spelled out for everyone around us to see.” Bruni’s sandwich board would read: “Eyesight compromised, could go blind.”
You ask, why announce your troubles? Doesn’t everyone have something? “Well, yes. Tell us anyway,” I think Bruni would reply. Maybe if we knew, we might slow down, turn and fumble toward each other. Perhaps, then I could say that you’re not alone, and I’m rooting for you, because I am.
— Min Jin Lee, in her book review of Frank Bruni’s “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found” titled “Eyesight Compromised. Could Go Blind.” (NY Times Book Review, Feb 28, 2022). Bruni had a rare stroke several years ago which damaged his optic nerve and severely impaired his eyesight. Read more here.
But these readers see another, different kind of vulnerability. Oprah Winfrey does, too, as I learned this week. On her Oprah Daily website, she has begun doing a series of “The Life You Want” classes, and she invited me to join her for one on Tuesday night to discuss my new book, “The Beauty of Dusk.” (The Times ran this excerpt last week.)
I’ll admit to being wowed simply that an advance copy had found its way into her hands, let alone that she’d read and wanted to talk about it. She specifically wanted to discuss its portrait of vulnerability and my description of my compromised and imperiled eyesight not as a diminution but as an education. She wanted to ponder vulnerability as a means of connection, a bridge.
And that is, indeed, how I tend and try to see it. To be vulnerable is to be more alert and ideally more sensitive to what’s going on around you. To be vulnerable is to let others in, and there’s promise as well as peril in that. To admit to vulnerability is to own up to being human. You show me someone who’s alive; I’ll show you someone who’s vulnerable.
There are days, sure, when my vulnerability feels like powerlessness and I tremble inside. There are quite a number of them, and that’s not about my eyesight but about a thousand other things — about the evanescence of pleasures that I so wish I could hold on to, about the inconstancy of people whom I’d prefer to depend on, about my own failure to keep some of the promises that I’ve explicitly or implicitly made, about the limits of my energy, which once seemed boundless.
I’m vulnerable to great disappointment. But that goes hand in hand with being open to great joy.
— Frank Bruni, from “Putin Is Teaching Us a Brutal Lesson About History” (NY Times, February 24, 2022). Bruni had a rare stroke several years ago which damaged his optic nerve and severely impaired his eyesight. Read more here.
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Notes:
Notes:
Q: The need to share it, isn’t that what drives most musicians?
Helen: I think what drives most musicians is not dissimilar from what drives most people.
Henry: And what’s that?
Helen: People want to be appreciated…
Henry: Being appreciated is not enough. Most people want to overcome something.
— Henry Cole, (Patrick Stewart), Coda (2019)
What is it we’re supposed to make of life? There is so much suffering–my own is a tiny stitch in a vast tapestry and many, many people suffer so much more than I have. What is it that keeps rising up in us even when we feel crushed? What keeps putting one foot in front of the other, or looks at the vague blue smudge of a sloe bush and is reminded of a truth that doesn’t even have a name? What is that? It isn’t me. It isn’t me that gets me up this hill each morning, but rather an irrepressibility that must be called life, life itself, a force working independently of my brain, body and mind. I don’t know what it is… What is it that is leaning forward in me now, towards the world? … What is it that dares to want to get back down this hill and go home and write? Or that wants to find out why things in nature are rarely blue. What is it that triggers the synapses that call to the muscles to work the body and keep going on? What is it that still insists on being happy? What is it that refuses the call of defeat?
— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Grove Press; May 12, 2020)
Book Review in The Guardian: “The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey review – a good night’s sleep? In her dreams“
“It isn’t about peace, a quiet life, not feeling things, not experiencing things. It’s about the shit hitting the fan, and having the courage to sit with yourself, not hide, not deny–to observe the tumult from the end of the snake’s tongue.”
— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Grove Press; May 12, 2020)
Note: Photo by NB Hunter
That night on the show, there’s an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it’s a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brain refuses to take in what is happening. This is called the incredulity response. “Those who live move,” he says.
~ Jenny Offill, Weather: A Novel (Knopf, February 11, 2020)
Notes: Photo: Nirav Patel. Related Posts: It’s been a long day
Notes:
There is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that’s going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: “You’ve turned up in the right place at the right time. You’re doing fine. Don’t ever think that you’ve been forgotten.”
– Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC
Notes:
“How long to Grand Central?”
“20 minutes, maybe 30, it’s Rush Hour.”
Uber driver. Black Toyota Camry. Leather seats worn. Dashboard tanned with thousands of hours of direct sunlight.
“Your English is good. Where are you from?”
He glances at me in the rear view mirror. Reticent.
“Ethiopia, Sir.”
“How long have you been here?”
“9 years.”
“And your family? Are they here or back in Ethiopia?”
“Oh, they’re all back in Ethiopia. I’m here with my wife.”
“Do you miss home?”
Long pause.
“People think it’s easy. Here in America.” He pulls up. Polite, respectful.
I shift the conversation. We’re a few minutes out.
“You have a 4.94 (out of 5) driver rating. Wow. That’s something. How do you do it?”
“I don’t know Sir.” He smiles.
“I’m curious. Out of 10 rides, how many riders tip?” [Read more…]
I live in town without all that racket
horses and carts stir up, and you wonder
How that could be. Wherever the mind
dwells apart is itself a distant place.
Picking chrysanthemums at my east fence,
far off, I see South Mountain: mountain
air lovely at dusk, birds in flight
returning home. All this means something
something absolute. Whenever I start
explaining it, I’ve forgotten the words.
Colors infusing autumn chrysanthemums
exquisite, I pick dew-bathed petals,
float them on that forget-your-cares
stuff. Even my passion for living apart
Soon grows distant. I’m alone, but after
that first cup, the wine jar pours itself.
Everything at rest, dusk: a bird calls,
returning to its forest home. Chanting,
I settle into my breath. Somehow, on this
east veranda, I’ve found my life again.
~T’ao Ch’ien, No. #3 and #4 from Drinking Wine in The Selected Poems of T’ao Ch’ien
Notes:
It is not always clear
these days whether between here and there,
I am supposed to break or
hold the line.
– Cynthia Dewi Oka, from “Elegy with a White Shirt”
Notes:
Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.
Notes:
I just keep taking the next step knowing there’s no call for standing in the crowd and recounting my failures, there’s no retribution that demands I shrug off the notice of the works of my hands. There’s no need to deny or lessen the good by stepping back into my wanderings to tell of the bad. There’s grace in the ordinary life I live that just needs to live, knowing it’s all miracle, all of this beautiful stuff every morning. All the days long.
~ Lisa Tindal, from “The Essence of Days”
(By one of our very own WordPress bloggers at the handle: Quiet Confidence)
Notes:
It’s worth mentioning that this is my edit. Of the roughly eight million words handwritten or typed into my diary since September 5, 1977, I’m including only a small fraction. An entirely different book from the same source material could make me appear nothing but evil, selfish, generous, or even, dare I say, sensitive. On any given day I am all these things and more: stupid, cheerful, misanthropic, cruel, narrow-minded, open, petty—the list goes on and on…It wasn’t easy revisiting what are now 156 volumes of my diary.
I broke the job up—a month or two per day—but after reading about me, I’d have to spend the rest of the day being me. I don’t know that I’ve ever done anything quite so exhausting.
~ David Sedaris, in his Introduction to his new book “Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)” (Little, Brown and Company, May 30, 2017)
Notes:
Don’t be afraid to suffer—take your heaviness
and give it back to the earth’s own weight;
the mountains are heavy,
the oceans are heavy.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke; “Sonnets to Orpheus”
Notes:
Live & Learn 