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

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.

Continue reading “Lightly Child, Lightly.”

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