Cygnet Wakes. Video (Volume Up) from this morning’s walk at Cove Island Park. Other photos on FB here.
The tide goes on, throwing itself again and again at the shore.
Notes:
- Video from this morning’s walk at Cove Island Park. 6:00 am. 48° F, feels like 43° F. For photos from this morning’s walk, click here.
- Post title: Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt (Tin House Books, March 7, 2023)
Sunday Morning
Pictures from this morning’s walk at Cove Island Park here.
Sunday Morning (19 sec)
DK Video @ Cove Island Park @ 5:53 a.m. this morning. Photos from this morning’s walk here.
Miracle. All of it. (19 sec)
Notes: Source: Lunch Time @ Monterey Bay. Post Title: Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”
Guess.What.Day.It.Is?
Notes:
- Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again.
Lightly Child, Lightly
Notes:
- Video: DK, Cove Island Park, May 25, 2022 @ Twilight. 5:03 am. More photos from yesterday morning 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.”
Tuesday Morning Meditation
My first attempt @ video. Far from awesome, but that won’t distract from the beauty of these Atlantic Brants. I’m smitten. Cove Island Park @ Daybreak on Sunday.
Gazing at the ‘Black Sun’
Gazing at the ‘Black Sun’: The Transfixing Beauty of Starling Murmurations (NY Times, April 4, 2022)
Each spring and autumn, the skies in southern Denmark come to life with the swirling displays of hundreds of thousands of starlings, an event known locally as “sort sol.”
Don’t miss photos and article here.
Thank you Susan.
Miracle. All of It.
Notes: Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
Sunday Morning
On Aug. 29, 1952, in an open-air converted barn in Woodstock, N.Y., pianist David Tudor, known for his interpretations of contemporary music, gave the premiere of a work by John Cage (1912-1992) remarkably different from anything else in the classical repertoire. Tudor had been familiar with the full range of the avant-garde, from the spacious pointillism of Morton Feldman’s “Extensions 3” to the thorny complexity of Pierre Boulez’s First Piano Sonata, both of which were also on the program.
For the Cage piece, however, the pianist curiously sat motionless at the keyboard, holding a stopwatch. The composer had indicated three separate movements with specific timings. Keeping an eye on the timepiece, Tudor announced the beginning of each section by closing the keyboard lid, then paused for the required duration before signaling its end by opening the lid again. All the rest was stillness; throughout the performance he didn’t make a sound.
But Cage’s “4’33”” is actually not about silence at all. Though most members of the audience were focused on the absence of music, there were also ambient vibrations they ignored: wind stirring outside, raindrops pattering on the tin roof—and, toward the end of the performance, the listeners themselves making “all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out. Music is continuous,” the composer explained. “It is only we who turn away.”
— Stuart Isacoff, from “The Sounds of Silence” (Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2021)
Notes:
- Video: John Cage: 4’33” for piano (1952)
- “The Story Behind John Cage’s 4’33”” by Lucas Reilly (Mental Floss, November 6, 2017)
Hands
As part of a closing hand-off ceremony for the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games and the 2024 games in Paris, choreographer Sadeck Waff worked with 128 performers in a dizzying performance focused on arms and hands. The French dancer and choreographer has become known for his limb-centric performances which you can watch more of on Instagram. Music by Woodkid. (via This is Colossal)
Thank you Mimi!
T.G.I.F.: Hummy (in slo mo)
It is a one-way trip
It is a one-way trip.
Each moment of life is a an irreplaceable jewel. If we could carry death on our left shoulder the way Carlos Castaneda suggests and treat every moment as the treasure it is, we would never waste our lives being angry, or petty. We would treat each encounter with a person or a place as the last one. Life continues to change, and with that change we evolve into something new. It doesn’t make what was before wrong but it is gone forever…
I think living here has for me been an opportunity to see this cyclic nature of seasons and yet every season is different. Certainly, I am different with each season.
At the end of my long life what I have discovered is that there are no ordinary days.
— Jean Aspen, Arctic Daughter: A Lifetime of Wilderness (2018)
Find Documentary Video on Amazon Prime Video
it was such a moment of truth
“Listening to Hania’s music over and over, I began to dream of a single sequence shot that would follow her music floating in the wind of an unreal Icelandic landscape. I asked each dancer to give a personal interpretation of Hania’s song. We were very lucky to succeed in this insane artistic performance despite the great cold (minus 7 celsius), it was such a moment of truth. Shot in Iceland on February 23, 2020”. — Neels Castillon, Director
Lightly Child, Lightly
Set wide the window.
Let me drink the day.
— Edith Wharton, Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses (First published May 10th 1909)
Notes:
- Image Source. Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels
- 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.”
Moved (By the Greatest Show on Earth)
NEW YORK — Ovations are on pause in the theaters and concert halls and stadiums of this city. But they haven’t ceased. They’ve just moved into the streets. Like clockwork, they happen, every evening at 7. Up and down Manhattan — and probably the Bronx and Staten Island, too — cheers ring out from apartment towers and brownstones, along with the sounds of rhythmic chants, applause and whistles. The denizens of this city of ordinarily high-decibel levels kick them up an ample notch at this hour for the doctors and nurses and technicians and administrators and custodians of the beleaguered ICUs and ERs. The new urban ritual, which is catching on in other cities, coincides with the shift break of hospital staffs, when medical workers emerge from the covid-19 war zone into the open air, to go home for a spell or smoke or eat or otherwise decompress…The tumultuous reception accorded the hospital workers, though, is no cry of despair. It is an impromptu curtain call, of multitudinous thank-yous, from a vast audience rooting for everyday heroes. It’s New Yorkers joining in a chorus, singing out in solidarity: “We are here.”
~ Peter Marks, from “The nightly ovation for hospital workers may be New York’s greatest performance” (Washington Post, April 6, 2020)
Sunday Morning. A Minute of Silence.
Tom Hanks as Mr. Fred Rogers in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” With an all-star performance by Matthew Rhys. Movie, Highly Recommended.