Tag: Taste

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Anger is a cousin of intelligence. If you are not revolted by certain things, you have no boundaries. If you have no boundaries, you have no self-knowledge. If you have no self-knowledge, you have no taste, and if you have no taste, why are you here?

― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People (MCD, February 27, 2024)

Notes:

  1. Book Review: A Dazzling Humorist Returns With a Deep Dive Into Loss. NY Times, Feb 24, 2024.
  2. 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.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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December 29, 1941.

I’m at the age where I cease to reform my tastes:

I accept what I find—within—without shame.

— Patricia Highsmith, “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995.″ Anna von Planta (Editor). (Liveright, November 16, 2021)

Notes:

  • Side Note: Patricia Highsmith was 20 years old when writing this in her diary entry. 20 years old! And here I am…still workin’ it…
  • New York Times: 9 New Books We Recommend This Week
  • Photo credit

Truth

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This is the blessing for the first garden tomato: Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store sells in January, those red things with the savor of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name. How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm, warm as the flank of a cow in the sun. You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin. ~ Marge Piercy, from “The Art of Blessing the Day” in The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme. © Knopf, 1999.
Notes: Photo – Katharine Hanna with Organic vine-ripened tomatoes. Poem – A Year of Being Here

Saturday Morning

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Silence is radical. When sustained, it has an effect on your perception comparable to that of any number of chemicals with which you might seek change. Your vision transforms, to start with; you suddenly find yourself absorbing what’s on the periphery, massive amounts of once-invisible data assailing your pupils. When you’re not preparing your next remark, your hearing capacity expands, too: the changing rhythms of the wind; the muted thud of a teardrop hitting the wooden floor; your neighbor’s beating heart. And taste, and smell, they’re amplified and shifted, as well — a cup of tea sipped without the surrounding dialogue is a more intricate cup of tea. Silence gives you the opportunity to know any number of an object’s facets that typically disappear behind the verbal screens we erect constantly, unthinkingly, between our selves and our environments. And surely the power of wordless touch is one each of us knows; I need not expand on that.

~ Anna Wood, “A More Intricate Cup of Tea”

Notes: Photo by Ezgi Polat. Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels

Sunday Morning

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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest…No, the Book must be murmured day after day in a little ghetto hovel where you learn to lean forward and keep your arms tight against your hips so there will be as little space as possible between the hand that holds the Book and the hand that turns the pages. And if you moisten your fingers, you must raise them vertically to your lips, as if nibbling unleavened bread, and drop no crumb. The word must be eaten very slowly. It must melt on the tongue before you can dissolve it and reorder it. And take care not to slobber it onto your caftan. If even a single letter is lost, the thread that is about to link you with the higher sefirot is broken.

~ Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Mar 5, 2007)

Notes: Post inspiration from Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: Patty Maher, The Storm.