Tag: summer

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Notes:

  • Quote: Thank you Kurt via Cultural Offering
  • DK Photo @ Cove Island Park this morning. More photo’s here and here.
  • Post Title & 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.

T.G.I.F. I want our summers…

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…So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet
the angry voices next door, if only

for a brief whiff. I want our summers

to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked with love,
a table overflowing with baked goods
warming the already warm air. After all the pots

are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters
wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess.

Photo: Louis Hansel (via Unsplash)

If I held out an arm, eventually one would land on it and petal me into stillness

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It was high summer and there were hundreds of butterflies in there. I had stood and watched them gather, like living jewels, around a table of fruits, amazed at the way the tiny croziers of their tongues would uncurl and drink from the nectar of the oranges. The air was thick with them, spiraling as though played by little flurries of wind. If I held out an arm, eventually one would land on it and petal me into stillness. I loved to see how they mimicked the forms of the world on their wings – an ocellus, or the pattern of snake-print, all their gorgeous subterfuge. I had always wanted to be decorated like that, to hold out an arm and to have all the beauty of the world land on it, and make me beautiful, too.

—  Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir (Penguin Publishing, July 12, 2022)

Photo: DK – Monarch Butterfly. July 31, 2022. Backyard.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn37 Comments

I am floating on a blue rubber raft. My eyes are closed, face to the sun. Black motes dance around under my eyelids in the opaque red. I drift, listen to the sound of my breath going in and out, let the salt wind carry me to the middle of the pond. There is nothing but me. No one here but me. A perfect moment. I dangle my arm over the edge of the raft, open my fingers, feel the resistance of the water as it passes through them.

— Miranda Cowley Heller, The Paper Palace: A Novel (Riverhead Books, July 6, 2021)

Notes:

  • Debut novel.  Book, highly recommended.
  • NY Times Book Review: Summer After Summer, a Clan Returns to Cape Cod
  • Post Title & 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.”

Smell the bliss of summer

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Like clean sheets
On a breezy warm day
On a line
And walking through them
To feel the comfort on your skin
And smell the bliss of summer
As a child
Again

— Pascal Raymond Dorland @ paradoxdesign

Notes: Prose via Your Eyes Blaze Out. Photo: learnedtofly