Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners

Summer…It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool.

– Sarah Dessen, That Summer 


Notes: Quote: Thank you Whiskey River. Photo: Walking Geema

Sunday Morning

HE: I believe in God in every respect, but I don’t expect to understand His will. God is in music. I believe that the great composers speak to us about their experience of God. This is not nonsense. For me, Bach is a constant.

SHE: But you used to have doubts?

HE: Not about Bach.

~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel”

Sunday Morning

The wind stills for a moment
and
the whole world is silent as a prayer.

~ Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country


Photo: Alex William Helin with Still at Lake Buttermere in North West England

Sunday Morning

When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

Anything that touches.

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite
understandable. But holiness is visible,
entirely…

~ Mary Oliver, from “Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way” in Felicity.


Notes: Poem via Schonwieder. Photos via Aberrant Beauty

Sunday Morning

the mist
moved slowly across
the field held down
by stones, stitch of trees
what colour was the mist
x-ray grey
how still was it
the iv drip before it falls…

I stopped the car to watch it cross the field
black earth breathing its winter breath…

the field disappeared in the mist
still the bison stood

life can become so still

the iv drip
before it falls

earth of the body
where a life grows

the stillness between silence
and muteness…

– Anne Michaels, from “Bison” in All We Saw: Poems


Notes: Poem from Whiskey River. Photo: Winter Morning Mist by Sébastien Mamy