Photo: (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
Saturday Morning
October 12, 2019 by 9 Comments
Back in my room I located some tubes of Nescafé and a small electric pot. I made my own coffee, wrapped myself in a blanket, opened the sliding doors and sat on the little patio facing the sea. There was a low wall partially obstructing the view, but I had my coffee, could hear the waves and was reasonably content.
~ Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf, September 24, 2019)
Photo: heytess
Saturday Morning
October 5, 2019 by 10 Comments
I sat on my patio, wrapped in a blanket…when I noticed that my room was not on the ground floor but on the subfloor beneath, making it closer to the edge where the beach began…I turned on the radio and Nina Simone was singing I Put a Spell on You. The seals were silent, and I could hear the waves in the distance, winter on the West Coast. I sank into bed and slept heavily.
~ Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf, September 24, 2019)
Photo: Dream Inn Santa Cruz, CA by Angelo DeSantis
Saturday Morning
September 14, 2019 by 31 Comments
Beauty brings us to a halt: it imposes, if only for a flash, the cessation of activity. (On the lawn in front of the library, seeing a runner in red shorts complete the last flailing strides of a sprint before pitching forward, his fingers caressing soft dirt: I let my book fall.) Indolence and aesthetic experience both involve feelings of unbidden influence, involuntariness or absence of will. But where the experience of beauty is often significant and always pleasurable, idleness is more equivocal in its effects and character. Essentially contentless, idleness obtains its phenomenological shape from the objects around us—the pliancy of a chair, the gloss of an advertisement—and the thoughts and desires within us.
O’Connor, to his credit, resists conflating idleness with aesthetic bliss, or animal repose, or other unambiguously positive varieties of passivity. Yet experience without content has little to recommend it. Without some consciously chosen value that organizes how we do nothing, we may find that our idle time makes us less free rather than more.
~ Charlie Tyson, from “Idleness” in The Point (September 5, 2019)
Source: Quote – Thank you The Hammock Papers. Photo: via see more.
Saturday Morning
August 24, 2019 by 46 Comments
Let my words become like a skilled
Potter’s hands,
Quieting,
Smoothing your life
With their knowledge,
Reaching into your tender core
And spreading you out
Like the morning …
~ Hafiz (1315-1390), from “Your Shape of Laughter” in “The Subject Tonight Is Love. 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz”
Photo: katrinauld. Poem via finita–la–commedia
Saturday Morning
August 17, 2019 by 29 Comments
Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment
when, nothing
happens
no what-have-I-to-do-today-list
maybe half a moment
the rush of traffic stops.
The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be
slows to silence,
the white cotton curtains hanging still.
~ Marie Howe, “The Moment” (via Poets.org)
Photo: Eylül Aslan
Saturday Morning. And then, little by little…
August 10, 2019 by 16 Comments
You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so.
Notes: Quote – Thank you Whiskey River. Photo: Jacqueline Green, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Photo by Richard Calms. (via Mennyfox55)
Saturday Morning
August 3, 2019 by 19 Comments
Leave it alone…
let the bones cool…
~ Lisa Taddeo, Three Women (July 9, 2019)
Notes:
- Inspired by: “One of the most difficult aspects of the frantic rush through a busy life is that we often do not allow even the smallest notion of “completion” to enter the picture of our daily lives. We often rush from task to task, so much so that the end of one task is just the invitation to start another. There are no gaps in between in which we could take even a few seconds to sit, to take stock, to realize that we have just completed something. Just the reverse: how many times do we hear ourselves say, “I haven’t achieved anything at all today?” If you can practice cultivating a sense of completeness- even a glimmer, right now, in this moment, with the little things of life- there is a chance that you would be better able to cope with those aspects of mind that keep telling you that you are not there yet; not yet happy, not yet fulfilled. You might learn that you are complete, whole, just as you are.” ~Mark Williams & Danny Penman, Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (via Make Believe Boutique)
- Photo (via Newthom)
T.G.I.F.: It’s been a long week
July 19, 2019 by 12 Comments
There is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that’s going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: “You’ve turned up in the right place at the right time. You’re doing fine. Don’t ever think that you’ve been forgotten.”
– Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC
Notes:
- Inspired by another quote from Whiskey River: “Perhaps I’m old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. ~ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Painting “Swallow” (2011) by Nicky Loutit (via Your Eyes Blaze Out).
- Quote via Whiskey River
