Walking. In cool water from Lake of Memory.

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 clopand 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. [Read more…]

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this.” Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions–trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there….

Virginia Woolf, from “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader 1925)


Notes:

  • Quote via Whiskey River. Portrait via The New Yorker
  • Inspired by: “We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone.  ~ Stefan Zweig, Confusion (NYRB Classics; Tra edition (July 25, 2012) (via The Hammock Papers)

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Walked by this box at Cove Island Park, what, 100x? 200x? 500x? Had never seen it before.  Today, I noticed.

[Read more…]

Sunday Morning

Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.

~ Virginia Woolf


Photo: Padma Inguva (via Aberrant Beauty). Quote: via Memory’s Landscape

Saturday Morning

I will cut adrift—

I will sit on pavements & drink coffee—

I will dream;

I will take my mind out of its iron cage & let it swim—this fine October.

— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry c. Wednesday, October 15, 1927


Photo via 8tracks.com

3:45 A.M.: Yes, all that.

night-light-window

I need solitude.
I need space.
I need air.
I need the empty fields round me;
and my legs pounding along roads;
and sleep;
and animal existence.

~ Virginia Woolf, from The Diary of Virginia Woolf


Notes: Poem – thank you Beth (again) on Alive on all Channels. Photo: Mennyfox55

 

 

It’s been a long day

maryna-ignatieva-on-the-verge
Month by month
things are losing their hardness;
even my body now lets the light through;
my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle.
I dream; I dream.

~ Virginia Woolf, The Waves


Notes:

Monday. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.

panel,motion

I think the British writer James Meek is accurate when he describes Light Years (1975) by the American novelist James Salter. […]

“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.”

And this, again, is a common experience [from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921)]:

“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

~ Galen Strawson, I am Not a Story


Art: Simon Birch (via Lost at E Minor)

Saturday Morning

dreaming-clouds

I feel so intensely the delights
of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own,
with pictures and music
and everything beautiful.

~ Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out


Source: Poem – To Escape from the Commonplaces of Existence. Photo: Anka Zhuravleva

Saturday Morning: I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.

sunrise, morning, sunset

Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. Therefore all this flitter flutter of weekly newspapers interests me not at all. These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.

~ Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary


Credits: Quote – Brainpickings: Virginia Woolf on the Paradox of the Soul and the Consolatios of Aging. Photograph: j’aime juste la photo

What’s the passion for?

ribbon-red-suspended

My own brain
is to me the most unaccountable of machinery –
always buzzing,
humming,
soaring
roaring
diving,
and then buried in mud.
And why?
What’s this passion for?

~ Virginia Woolf


Credits: Poem – Et in Arcadia Ego*

Thinking is my fighting.

yoga-woman


Running. The Survivor.

rain_drops_at_night-wide

It’s Monday morning. 8:00 am. I’m waiting out the rain.

It’s Tuesday morning. I’m noodling on why I waited to write this post. I broke the chain: Run. Write the post. Nap.

Life and order. Life, and of course, order.

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle—for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.

—Virginia Woolf

Back to Monday.

The rain doesn’t let up.

Mom now has Dad’s cold.  Zeke is stuck with Dad for his morning walk. The morning routine is turned upside down. He glares at me: “Where’s Mom?” He hears the rain popping on the car hood.  He snarls.

Life and order. Life, and of course, order.

We arrive at Mianus River Park. Hail size drops are splashing on the windshield.  I notice there isn’t a single car in the parking lot.  My spirits climb.  Rain be damned.

Survivor.
[Read more…]

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