Tag: Ted Kooser

Lightly child, lightly (v. Kooser)

Live & Learn6 Comments

light-sun

What does the earth’s shadow look like flying through space? A jellyfish, perhaps, swimming at the speed of light with filaments streaming behind. At sunrise or sunset, if you stand on a hilltop, with your arms spread out and your fingers fluttering like feathers, your shadow can ride at the top of that enormous, flying darkness, racing forever into the stars.

~ Ted Kooser, “December.” The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book

Notes:

  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect 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.”
  • Image (edited) Source: ccanddumplins via Sensual Starfish

 

Cold Rain

Live & Learn3 Comments

rain-gif

After fifty years of tracking clouds
I’ve become cold rain upon my life.
How odd to see the mist so clearly.

~ Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

Image: zero-void

 

No stopping it now

Live & Learn31 Comments

black and white

I once read of a climber who, while clinging to the face of a climb thousands of feet above an alpine valley, said he could feel the earth turn under his hands. And I have read that a person with patience could move an aircraft carrier tied at a dock by leaning long enough against its side to get it started, knowing that once it began to move there’d be no bringing it back, and it came to me that the earth behaves like that, steadily moving out into time under the common pressure of billions of hands.

No stopping it now.

~ Ted Kooser, December. The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book

Credits: Photograph – boulderporn

 

Again this morning, in a cold wind

Live & Learn11 Comments

bridge-cables-red-Golden-Gate-Bridge

Again this morning, in a cold wind from the future, I walked all the way to the end of the long bridge of my life, having a look at its cables, its rods and rivets, its perforated metal flooring through which I could see whitecaps slamming the pylons. Then I turned and came back, inspecting it all from the other direction, fretting about every hex nut and bolt though they seem sound enough to hold things together. I ought to give the long bridge of my life a little rest, but every day it seems I’m walking from past to possibility and back to past with my brush and aluminum paint, hiding the rust, the deepening cracks, dabbing a shine here and there.

~ Ted Kooser, November. The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book

Notes:

  • Note to self: Now. 4:23 am. 21º F. Wind, cold. 13 mph from the West.
  • Credits: Photograph – peopleus.

Awakening

Live & Learn8 Comments

photography,black and white

How heavy it is, this bucket
drawn out of the lake of sleep
with a dream slipping over,
so heavy that on some mornings
you can’t quite pull it free
so let it slip back under,
back into the darkness where
the water is warm, even warmer,
but the dream, like a minnow,
has swum away and is merely
a flash in the murky distance,
and the weight of waking up
seems even heavier. But somehow
you lift it again, its handle
biting into your fingers,
and haul it out and set it down
still rippling, a weighty thing
like life itself, in which you dip
the leaky cup of your hands
and drink.

~ Ted Kooser, “Awakening“, Splitting an Order.

Image Source: Michalina Wozniak