Fortune Cookie Photo: Thank you Joan Perry. Thank you Ray for sharing. Pictures from this morning’s walk here.
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
April 24, 2023 by 18 Comments
Modern life has clogged my skull to the limit. Technology has delivered an avalanche of options to preoccupy me at any hour; the notion of idle time that can’t be filled with some form of digital distraction is foreign to me, almost unnerving.
If you’re reading this column on a phone, or any sort of computer, you’re seconds away from all kinds of diversions—social media, digital games, the state of your 401(k), the latest celebrity embarrassment or political mess…
For me, the problem comes when I need to think for myself. If you read this column, you know that any kind of complicated thinking is hard for me, and perhaps impossible. My brain’s interior is not a series of mathematical formulas dancing around balletically, like it does for beautiful-minded geniuses in the movies. My brain is more like a slop-sink faucet, slowly dripping. Or an arcade machine that only plays 70’s-era Pong…
As I get older, I realize I need to utterly unplug. My ideas will not come from my phone, a Facebook post or the latest tire fire on Twitter. For me, they come from digital distance, from oxygen and exercise and especially from time spent outdoors. There once was a time I could get ideas from staring at websites, but not anymore. I get them from looking at trees…
I fear we’re getting worse. Technology just gets better, as those airport bookstores get smaller. I’m wary of our artificial-intelligence future, and the notion that we will lean on bots to think for us, writing code, speeches and even poetry. It sounds like more off-loading of our brain space to technology. And to what end? To watch more episodes of “Love Is Blind?”
I don’t want to sound like I’ve figured it out. I’m not saying this brain of mine is on the cusp of a breakthrough. My brain will not save the world. It barely remembers why it went to the supermarket.
But to get anywhere real, it needs to be uncluttered. It needs to be empty. I mean empty more than the usual. It needs to be bored. And for me that means: unplugged.
— Jason Gay, from “The Joy of a Totally Empty Brain. Modern distractions cannot compete with the inspiration of old fashioned boredom (wsj.com, April 21, 2023)
Walking. In cool water from Lake of Memory.
March 11, 2023 by 25 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. [Read more…]
Walking. On Sunday Morning.
February 26, 2023 by 38 Comments
There she is. 7:30 am, December 28, 2022. She’s the middle aged runner that I mentioned in prior posts, a runner who runs every day, every day at least since I’ve been out on these morning walks, and again this morning, 1026 consecutive (almost) mornings, like in a row.
It was a mild December morning, 32° F, but, oh, that sunrise, and oh the photos on that glorious day. I happened to be in the right spot at the right time to get a shot of her coming and going.
I want to use a ‘Lori word’ to describe her, diminutive. I had to look it up. But anyone who runs with the persistence that she does, is anything but diminutive. Driving rain, biting cold, humid August mornings, she’s running. [Read more…]
Walking. On Sunday Morning.
February 12, 2023 by 24 Comments
It’s not the red car, but the black sedan behind it. Shot was taken this morning from across the cove, from a distance. At the start and end of my morning walks, I pull in here to take my first and last shots, but not today. Heavy cloud cover, and…
1013 consecutive (almost) days on this Cove Island morning walk. Like in a row. It’s brisk out, 28° F, feels like 23° F.
For the last 6 (?) months, mostly every morning, the black sedan is parked here, overnight. Car running, exhaust drifts upward, condensation drips and pools on the asphalt.
Who are you? What’s your story? Sleep here by choice (not really ‘choice’ with rents at nose bleed levels)? Bad decisions? Bad luck? Working 2 jobs, banking cash for better days ahead? [Read more…]
Morning Walk
February 11, 2023 by 29 Comments
“notice the dog’s tail wagging, the sound of the dog’s feet clicking on the pavement, the clouds of breath coming out of your dog’s mouth on a cold day”
— Joy Rains, from “The stress secret: 12 ways to meditate – without actually meditating” (The Guardian, Feb 9, 2023)
Video of Wally Walking. VOLUME UP! Thank you Susan.
Walking. In place inaccessible to unbelief.
January 15, 2023 by 50 Comments
5:05 am. I peek at the weather app: 27° F, feels like 15° F, wind gusts up to 32 mph.
Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
Hmmmmmm, not feelin’ it.
Everyone in the house sleeps, snuggled under their comforters. Wally snores peacefully. I slide my hand onto his belly, and it moves up and down with his inhale and exhale. What joy this creature has brought, this little ball of life.
I get out of bed. Sigh. Thick wool socks. Smart Wool, long underwear. Hoodie. Snow pants. Lined Boots. Come on Arctic blast, hit me, give me your best shot.
I walk.
Not a soul in the park. No runners. No walkers. No dredgers, who are off for the long weekend. And here I am, 985 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
Surprised, I am, at the ebbs and flows. 12 years here at this blogging thing, and it’s ebbing, a low tide that ebbs 1 day, and ebbs 2 days and ebbs 3 days, followed by a shoulder shrug. Time with Wally. Time with book. Time with Netflix. [Read more…]
Lightly Child, Lightly.
December 8, 2022 by 20 Comments
Not far from the city I had a secret refuge, a small cove that I liked to visit at the kindling of the morning star. At that hour there was nothing more translucent under heaven than the shallow sea between the rocks. The seabed was everywhere visible and the water, blue as an eye, grew lighter the closer you got to the surface, until it turned green, then vanished—and I breathed it in.
It was there that the god found me.
– Sjón, The Whispering Muse
Notes:
- Quote: Thank you Sawsan for sharing. 942 consecutive (almost) days in a row on this morning walk in my almost “secret refuge, a small cove that I liked to visit at the kindling of the morning star.” These words magic, capture it.
- DK Photo @ Daybreak. 6:14 am. 48° F. December 8, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More pictures from this morning’s walk 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.”
Lightly Child, Lightly.
November 17, 2022 by 12 Comments
It sometimes sweeps through him in quick glimpses like an illumination and yes, yes, then he’s filled with a kind of happiness and he thinks that there might be a place somewhere… what if everything could be like that? … He thinks about a place like that, which is obviously no place, he thinks, he falls into a kind of sleep that isn’t like sleep but more a bodily movement where he’s not moving… everything’s heavy and hard and there’s a place in the big heaviness that’s an unbelievably gentle shining light, like faith, yes, like a promise.
Notes:D
- DK Photo @ Daybreak. 67° F, with light rain. 6 am. November 12, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
- 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.”
Lightly Child, Lightly.
October 27, 2022 by 20 Comments
I saw a man once, I waved to him and he did not wave back; I felt very self-conscious, partly because of how often I was walking this road. I walked until I got to the small cove we had driven past the first day we came here that had thrilled me so quietly; it still gave me a quiet sense of awe… And then I would walk back again.
— Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea: A Novel (Random House, September 20, 2022)
Notes:
- Elizabeth Strout’s words spoke to me, this 905th consecutive day (almost, like in a row) on my morning walk at Cove Island Park.
- Photos from yesterday’s morning walk @ Cove Island Park. More photos from yesterday’s walk 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.”
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
October 17, 2022 by 20 Comments
At the end of our final conversation, I asked — hoping to give her some relief from talking about the project of performance and the burdens of age — what’s delighting her right now, what ideas or wishes or artworks are keeping her company mentally. Her voice changed. “Gosh. I’m quite — ” she stopped. “Tired.” The tone of her voice shifted so suddenly, twisted to the forlorn so dramatically, that I grew alarmed. But she was just having trouble conjuring an answer to the question. It had been a long day, and now it was 11 o’clock: She was tired. What was on her mind? Learning to surf. The journalism of Anne Applebaum. Growing things in her garden. A slim novel called “Assembly,” by Natasha Brown. She paused. “You know what I’d love to do, too? I’d love to go for a really, really long walk.”
“How long?”
“Not one of those where I’m going to buy a pack of cigarettes and never come back — ” and we were laughing again. “Not that kind of walk.”
The thing about a long walk is it’s an experience of process, of being in the corridor between the place you started and the place you will eventually be. “It’s like that moment of suspension in dance when you don’t know whether the dancer is taking off or about to land,” Blanchett said. She gestured with her body, as if she were going to take wing and hover. “That moment, that intake of breath before the words come out or the music comes out.” She smiled. “I want to be there. I want to be permanently there.”
— Jordan Kisner, The Elusive Power of Cate Blanchett (NY Times Magazine, October 11, 2022)
Tuesday Morning Walk
July 26, 2022 by 13 Comments
The sky is a soft blue and I begin the walk…winding down to the center of my everything.
— Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling: A Novel (Knopf, June 7, 2022)
Notes:
- Photo: DK, July 23, 2022. 5:30 a.m. Stamford, CT.
- DK Rating: Highly Recommended. Amazon Top Books of 2022. Selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick. NY Times Editor’s Choice Top 10 Books of the Week. NY Times Book Review here.
Walking. Being A Little More Human.
May 24, 2022 by 27 Comments
Monday. 4:48 a.m. Why so early? There is some logic, disturbing as it may seem to some, to catch twilight, or daybreak, or first light or whatever you may want to call it — I have to leave the house precisely 60 minutes from Sunrise. And since Sunrise changes every day, and I have no clue why, my rise-and-go changes daily. For this machine is wound as tight as a Swiss Clock. Precisely (Mostly.) Daily. (Generally.)
So back to the walk. 747 consecutive days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row. (Almost.)
64° F, feels like 62° F. This is from the Dark Sky App. No bloody chance in hell it’s even close. Wind gusting up to 20 mph. It feels like a brisk 49°. And thank the lightening bolt premonition before I left the house — I put on a windbreaker or this would have been a damn short walk this morning. And be damed, if I’m still not cold.
So, back to the walk. It’s 4:50 a.m. and I’m getting out of the car. There’s only one other car in the parking lot. What sort of other lunatic is up at this hour? In case of a future need, this may be a match for bone marrow transplant, or white cell transplant, there’s gotta be some bone-to-bone connection here.
I sling the straps of my backpack over my shoulders, synch down the straps, lock the car, and walk.
And walk.
And there he is. The owner of the other car. He’s approaching. He’s carrying a white cleaning caddy in his right hand. Two toilet brushes, cleaning supplies, rags. The white of the caddy, is as white as my egrets. It illuminates the darkness.
Saturday Morning
April 30, 2022 by 8 Comments
I love going on walks by myself. No pressure to keep up conversation. And there is something about movement that helps me think. To charge an idea with the body’s inertia. To carry a feeling through the distance and watch it grow.
— Ocean Vuong, The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation (therumpus.net, August 24, 2014)
Photo: Daybreak. 5:49 a.m., April 30, 2022. 41° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.
Walking. With One (Good) Wing Creatures.
March 12, 2022 by 26 Comments
5:15 a.m. I’m out the door. Dark Sky is calling for rain. Let’s see.
It’s been ~675 mornings, almost consecutive. Like in a row. I’m on my daybreak walk @ Cove Island Park.
It’s not all glorious Swans and pirouettes.
There she is. Up top. The Gull. She? He? Sorry, with no disrespect intended to whatever it is, I’m old school. Or just old. I don’t know its pronoun, and we’re going with She.
I wasn’t paying attention. Not downward anyway. And typically, the wildlife clears out-of-the-way when Darth Vader approaches. A 6’1″ human, black hoodie, black jacket, black sweat pants, black gloves, black toque (pronounced tuuuk), and a matching black backpack. Darth, who recently had foot surgery, happens to be dragging his right leg, with his Sorel boot scraping the asphalt behind him. So all winged creatures give Darth wide berth.
[Read more…]
Walking. Quiet with Highsmith.
January 27, 2022 by 35 Comments
6:00 a.m. Forget the preamble. Take my word for it. It’s cold.
I twist in my ear buds and cue up Patricia Highsmith’s 1000 page diary on Audible. I’m 900 pages in, the home stretch. It’s late August, she’s living in France: “My French house is like my life and body. The garden represents work, very hard work, never perfect, never finished, and I find there is hardly one day a year when I can say, ‘It all looks nice.’”
I think about this for a moment, nodding, in full agreement with the metaphor, and work.
I sit in the car, building up the energy to step out in the cold. And she continues, and has me twisting on a follow-on post: “Work is the only thing of importance or joy in life. Trouble begins when one pauses to consider what one has done.” I noodle on both ends of this sandwich and get out of the car. Too deep, too early in the morning.
I walk. Shuffling in my Sorel boots, counterclockwise around the park. The Connecticut-Chinook at my back.
The curtain is preparing to rise at 7:10.
It’s Quiet.
“This has to have been a transforming practice – almost two years of quietness,” a friend on FB posits.
I stand looking out over the horizon. The blues. The oranges. The yellows. And all of it blending and shimmering on the water. A Rothko-looking exhibit.
And then I’m back to Highsmith in the 1970’s: “With greater universal education, there is paradoxically greater stupidity. One gets further from the land and nature, instead of being in harmony with it, as were our less educated forebears. We now read about pills and take them—and are afraid to give an honest belch.”
Transformation & Quiet & Harmony.
Hmmmm.
You know DK, you may have gotten this Thing right.
Note: (1) DK @ Daybreak. 6:36 to 6:50 am, January 27, 2022. 12° F, feels like 9° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More of this morning photos here. (2) Rothko was described by Sawsan!
Walking. Who but an imbecile?
January 22, 2022 by 43 Comments
5:00 a.m. Glance at weather app. 10° F, feels like Hell frozen over. Wind gusts up to 30 mph. Every ligament and nerve ending in the body is screaming, No! Stay under the covers.
But Duty calls. That magnetic pull. To what, for what, God only knows. But it pulls.
I’m sitting in the car at Cove Island Park, and, yes, the heater blows on my feet.
I twist in my ear buds and cue up Patricia Highsmith’s 1000 page diary on Audible. I’m 800 pages in and she grumbles: “Who but an imbecile would have chosen such a hard way?”
I step out. A wind gust greets my start. Both eye balls gush water in defense. And they keep draining. Must be another one of these old age blessings, sh*t leaking oil from all orifices.
Bela called it. “It can be below zero, and I can go out in crocs if it’s dry…But if there’s moisture in the air, you can never warm up below 30F.” Yep, Bela. Here we stand. Frigid wind (Chinook the Albertan’s call it, except wet) blowing off Long Island Sound, and it’s ripping right through my North Face gear. I’m coated with 3 layers from head to toe, except for the face which is exposed. Face-lift, no charge, God-Styling.
I walk.
I take the loop with the wind at my back. (I’m not a total imbecile.) [Read more…]
Walking. With Agnes.
December 23, 2021 by 30 Comments
“You can walk. This is a gift. You can breathe and you can think and you can navigate a long room and sit with an old woman and ask questions about what life and art really mean. This is what they really mean: They are happening right now. They are happening to you and those in this world right now. And life and the arts and the people to whom they are happening are gifts to you, family for you. Embrace them. Listen to them. Navigate the long room to get to them and ask questions and listen and argue and create.
“There is so much beauty to see and to feel. Right now.
“Walk! Move your arms! Breathe!
“Get out and get to the life that is happening.”
– Agnes de Mille, from an Interview with James Grissom in 1989 titled: “Agnes de Mille: Get to the Life”. She was 85 at the time of the interview.
Notes:
- Photos during Morning walk this morning. Photo 1: DK @ Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT this morning @ 6:15 a.m. Photo 2: DK @ Calf Pasture Park, Norwalk, CT this morning @ 7:41 a.m.
- Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
Walking. With Franzen.
October 9, 2021 by 34 Comments
6:45 a.m. – ish this morning. I’m walking Cove Island Beach. I reach the breakwall, and pause. It’s hard not to look out into this and not feel Small. The gentle breeze off the ocean. The lapping of the waves on the shoreline. The cloud formations. The warmth in early October. The thin strip of sunlight on the horizon.
Mark Oliver Everett: Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you.
And this beauty, the landscape in front, and the words from Audible being pumped into my head from Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, made me feel exactly that: Just too beautiful. [Read more…]
Live & Learn 