Tag: thoughts

Light Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn17 Comments

The only difference between a lake with waves and a lake without waves is the wind. A lake would be calm except for the wind. We would be calm if not for our thinking. We can tell how much of a turbulent effect the wind has on the lake by the size and strength of the waves. We can tell how much effect our thinking is having on us by the size and strength of our feelings. The wind is invisible. We can only feel the effects of it. Most of the thinking that affects us is also invisible. Our feelings are the only thing that tells us something is amiss.

– Jack Pransky, Somebody Should Have Told Us!: Simple Truths for Living

Notes:

  • Video: DK. April 22, 2024 @ 5:30 am at Cove Island Park.
  • 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.
  • Inspired by: “It is exhausting, dizzying. It is good to feel all sorts of things, even the bad things that scare you, because they, too, push you in the direction of your convictions. — Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 6, 2024)
  • Also inspired by: “When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.” —Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Grove Press in 2012)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn22 Comments

We’re living in what they call the “Information Age,” but life only seems to be making less sense. We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of “boundaries,” failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own. The machine is malfunctioning, and we’re trying to think our way out of it. In 1961, Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” Our mission, it seems, has to do with the mind.

— Amanda Montell, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality (Atria/One Signal Publishers, April 9, 2024)

Notes:

Walking. In cool water from Lake of Memory.

Live & Learn25 Comments

1040 (not your tax return), 1040 consecutive (almost) days on this Cove Island morning walk. Like in a row. 

But for the wind and the light rain, it would be a pleasant, 35° F morning in March. Ah yes, but for the wind and the light rain…it feels like 26° F, and the hood is up to protect this morning’s erratic ruminations. Diane Ackerman: “the brain’s genius is its gift for reflection. What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to…,” no, i can’t say the word, let’s just say whatever comes after the End.

My weather app flashes an alert for a Coastal Flood Warning. With heavy rains overnight, the park, and its paths, are splotched with puddles. My boots are caked with mud from yesterday’s adventures, and rather than step around the puddles, I step through the center of them hoping the water line falls short of my boot tops. There is something ever so soothing about the clop clop clop — and racing barefoot through puddles during rainy summer days in August as an adolescent. The body light, floats like a feather, B.A., Before Adulthood, and the accumulation of the Heavy. My body veers towards one puddle and then the next, clop, clop, clop.  “Give me quickly / the cool water flowing from the Lake of Memory” inscribed on a fourth-century-B.C. Greek tablet.

I walk. Continue reading “Walking. In cool water from Lake of Memory.” →

Sleep, Harris. Rest from Yourself.

Live & Learn15 Comments

Rest…

leave behind fear, hope, anger, spilled milk.

Take silence only.

Sky, wind. Sunrise after the rain.

Forget the rest.

Sleep, Harris.

Rest from yourself.

— Reverend West (Vondie Curtis-Hall), Raymond & Ray (Apple TV+, 2022)

 

 

A coloured cloud

Live & Learn25 Comments

As I wash the dishes I am filled with an invigorating emptiness and amuse myself with the soap bubbles. The water comes out of the tap with a rhythm that demands music. I accompany it with bursts of whistling and a phrase from a nondescript popular song. I play with the lather, which is like a cloud in which seasonal colours gleam then fade. I grasp the cloud in my hand and distribute it over the plates, glasses, cups, spoons and knives. It inflates as drops of water run over it. I scoop it up and make it fly through the air and it laughs at me, and my sense of having time to spare increases. My mind is blank, as indifferent as the noonday heat. But images of memories descend from afar and land in the bowl of water, neutral memories, neither painful nor joyful, such as a walk in a pine forest, or waiting for a bus in the rain, and I wash them as intently as if l had a literary crystal vase in my hands. When I am sure they’re not broken, they return safely to where they came from in the pine forest, and I remain here. I play with the soapy lather and forget what is absent. I look contentedly at my mind, as clear as the kitchen glass, and at my heart, as free of stains as a carefully washed plate. When feel completely sated with invigorating emptiness, I fill it with words of interest to nobody but me: these words!

— Mahmoud Darwish, “A coloured cloud” in “A River Dies of Thirst“

Notes: