Being born is like this:
The sunflowers slowly turn their corollas toward the sun.
The wheat is ripe.
The bread is eaten with sweetness.
My impulse connects to that of the roots of the trees.
— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Notes:
Notes:
why don’t you read a poem about the sunrise written 5 centuries ago and contemplate the fact that we have been writing about the same sun for centuries upon centuries and then maybe you’ll calm down
— Michael
Notes:
In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…
— Egon Schiele, as quoted by Reinhard Steiner in Egon Schiele, 1890-1918: The Midnight Soul of the Artist.
Notes:
…And I should mention the light
which falls through the big windows this time of day
italicizing everything it touches…
— Billy Collins, from “Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant” in Ballistics: Poems (Picador; June 18, 2009)
Notes:
Notes:
Notes:
All we ever talk of is light—
let there be light, there was light then,
good light—but what I consider
dawn is darker than all that.
So many hours between the day
receding and what we recognize
as morning, the sun cresting
like a wave that won’t break
over us—as if light were protective,
as if no hearts were flayed,
no bodies broken on a day
like today. In any film,
the sunrise tells us everything
will be all right. Danger wouldn’t
dare show up now, dragging
its shadow across the screen.
We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark
the beginning of a day is.
— Maggie Smith, “How Dark the Beginning”
Notes:
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
— Mary Oliver, ”The Buddha’s Last Instruction,” from House of Light.
Notes:
“Ring of Fire” Solar Eclipse. DK @ Daybreak. 5:46 am, June 10, 2021. 70° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
We ought to ask ourselves again and constantly: Why fill our lives with such effort and torment, when we know that we will be here only once and when we have such a brief and unrepeatable time in this indescribably beautiful world?
— Semezdin Mehmedinovic, My Heart: A Novel. (Catapult, March 9, 2021)
Notes:
Photo: DK @ Daybreak 6:31 am, April 14, 2021. 45° F. Norwalk, CT. More pictures from this morning’s walk on Calf Pasture Beach can be found here.
But then the sun came out where I live this week, and I was alive again. Dunno if you’ve noticed this, but it’s been the longest year since records began, and the timing of lockdown restrictions easing this week coinciding with warm weather in parts of England – which the press was more than happy to call a “heatwave” – has me feeling quite hopeful. I can hear a bird tweeting as I type this sentence! The sun is in the sky! Life begins anew! …
There is a tingling, bright feeling in the air that feels alien to a lot of us – anticipation, maybe, the idea that lido visits will soon lead to pub visits that will one day lead to music festivals and cheap summer holidays. I have a haircut booked in for 12 April and, after a full year without anything to anticipate, it might be the most excited about anything I’ve ever been in my life. Spring is a season of green shoots. Being able to go to someone’s garden and interact with five other people who have spent a year forgetting how to make small talk finally feels like one of them.
— Joel Golby, from “What is that weird, tingling feeling? Could it possibly be … hope?” in “The Guardian” March 30, 2021
Photo: DK @ Daybreak, March 30, 2021, Norwalk, CT. 6:38 am.
DK @ Daybreak. 6:10 to 6:17 am, March 13, 2021. 32° F, feels like 22° F, wind gusts up to 30 mph. Rowayton Beach, Norwalk, CT
It’s been almost a full month since I’ve had anything to say on this blog. A full month. It’s as if I’ve lost my voice. Posting puppy pictures. Sylvia Plath quotes. Camels. What’s next? Memes?
This dry spell coincides with my sipping of the ~900 page tome by Heather Clark: “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.” And here’s Sylvia: “I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more—to learning. Always.” Live & Learn? We see where that got her, right?
257 consecutive days. My morning walks around Cove Island Park. Without a single missed day. That’s today’s climax, up top. What can one possibly say, or write about, that’s more important than THIS? That’s bigger than THIS?
It used to matter, blogging, that is. It used to mean something. Posting every day. Sometimes twice day. Driving stats. Checking stats. Boosting views. Gaining followers. Counting Likes.
Today, not so much.
Sawsan poked the Bear about a week ago when she noticed posts have moved from daily to something else. I’m reconsidering this blogging thing. Running out of steam. [Read more…]
Daybreak. December 21, 2020. 6:45 to 7:46 am. 34° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford CT
Notes:
I consider the light that enters the room in the early hours of the day as a messenger of the sun, a direct voyager, a particle, a wave, who knows, but an object of sorts that left its solar source, covered miles, and landed on my skin. So the universe constantly visits us while waiting for us to reverse that itinerary.
— Etel Adnan, from Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, October 27, 2020)
Notes:
Live & Learn 