Photo: Debosavold – Lemure (via Cheetah Camp)
Tag: wake
Why I Wake Early
There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier…
I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
as though with your arms open.
And thinking: maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree —
they are all in this too.
And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.
At least, closer.
And, cordially.
Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky
of God, the blue air.
~ Mary Oliver, from “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?” in Why I Wake Early
Notes: Poem from Alive 0n All Channels. Photo: okdavid
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
I fret about any piece of writing I get into, because nothing you do in the past is going to do the next thing, even when you’re in your 80s.
I would never sit down and think I was about to turn out something good.
Quite the opposite.
~ John McPhee, “What I Think: John McPhee” (Princeton University, September 17, 2017)
John McPhee, 86, received the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Annals of the Former World” in 1999. In the same year, McPhee received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching from Princeton. He was rejected by The New Yorker for 15 years and eventually became a staff writer for The New Yorker for over 50 years, where much of the content of his 32 books originally appeared.
Notes:
- Source: Lori Ferguson – Princeton Grad. Word magician. Writer extraordinaire. Thank you for sharing this inspiration interview.
- Portrait of John McPhee from Longreads
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
Photo: by Toby Melville/Reuters from wsj.com – Thousands of wading birds flying onto sandbanks during high tide at The Wash estuary in Norfolk, England.
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
Notes:
- Inspired by Frank Ostaseski in his book titled The Five Invitations where he shares five habits of mind, orientations of spirit — through which an untruculent acceptance of death can become a love-expanding, life-expanding force: (1) Don’t wait. (2) Welcome everything, push away nothing. (3) Bring your whole self to the experience. (4) Find a place of rest in the middle of things. (5) Cultivate don’t know mind. In the remainder of The Five Invitations, Ostaseski delves deeper into each of these precepts to distill its vital lifeblood into insights and practices with which to enrich and ennoble our diurnal existence. (Source: Brain Pickings)
- Photo Manipulation: 2nd Photo “Splash” by Maurizio Raffa via 500px.com. First Photo purportedly by Raffa via mennyfox55)
Live & Learn 