A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.
– Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Photo: David Salter with rain
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape;
you can still see very little but you can smell the earth
and feel the wind blowing.
~ Iris Murdoch, from her debut novel: Under the Net
Notes: Quote via punlovsin. Photo by Arend Ruizendaal with Reading.
Had he remained standing there too briefly, chances are he would not have let the place get to him and consequently decided to devote his life to it. A few minutes, maybe. Long enough to hear the wind in the already wind-bent pines, the wind in his ears, the wind in his trouser legs, the pebbles under the soles of his shoes, his hand fiddling with coins in the pocket of his leather jacket, the oystercatcher’s shrill, Morse-like biik-biik-biik-biik. I picture my father turning to the cinematographer and saying: Listen to how quiet this place is.
~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel”
Photo Credit
Silence…
thrilling cold —
so much beauty.
Like breathing pure oxygen.
~ Susan Sontag, from “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980“
Notes:
Notes:
When the night slides under with the last dimming star
and the red sky lightens between the trees,
and the heron glides tipping heavy wings in the river,
when crows stir and cry out their harsh joy,
and swift creatures of the night run toward their burrows,
and the deer raises her head and sniffs the freshening air,
and the shadows grow more distinct and then shorten,
then we rise into the day still clean as new snow.
The cat washes its paw and greets the day with gratitude.
Every day we find a new sky and a new earth
with which we are trusted like a perfect toy…
We are given the wind within us, the breath
to shape into words that steal time…
Yet holy breath still stretches our lungs to sing.
We are lent for a time these minerals in water
and a morning every day, a morning to wake up,
rejoice and praise life in our spines, our throats,
our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues…
We are given passion to rise
like the sun in our minds with the new day
and burn the debris of habit and greed and fear.
We stand in the midst of the burning world
primed to burn with compassionate love and justice,
to turn inward and find holy fire at the core,
to turn outward and see the world that is all
of one flesh with us, see under the trash, through
the smog, the furry bee in the apple blossom,
the trout leaping, the candles our ancestors lit for us…
Let silence still us so you may show us your shining
and we can out of that stillness rise and praise.
~ Marge Piercy, from “Nishmat in “Available Light
Notes: Poem – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: Marta Navarro
Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by, and a willow listens
gracefully.
I hear all this, every summer…
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.
And I know where it is.
~ William Stafford, from “Why I Am Happy” in Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford by Kim Stafford
Notes: Poem – Thank you Hammock Papers. Photo: Elena Morelli
Tell me a flashlight.
at 2:30 in the morning.
Here come sparklers.
Use them to trace letters of light in the darkness.
Tell me the world.
Here comes light, unspoken.
Light hooks a claw on the horizon, pulls itself into view.
Here comes water, saline, scattering single-celled organisms.
Land is a puppet. It climbs hydrothermal vents like stairs.
Lava congeals. Land rises.
Here comes land, hand-springing out of water.
Wind is a comma, pausing the day…
~ Rebecca Lehmann, edited from Natural History (Brooklyn State Hospital, December 19, 2015)
Notes:
“I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.”
— May Sarton, from “Gestalt at Sixty: Part 1″, in A Durable Fire: Poems
Notes:
I have found such joy in simple things;
A plain, clean room, a nut-brown loaf of bread,
A cup of milk, a kettle as it sings,
The shelter of a roof above my head.
And in a leaf-laced square along the floor,
Where yellow sunlight glimmers through the door.
I have found such joy in things that fill
My quiet days: a curtain’s blowing grace,
A potted plant upon my windowsill,
A rose, fresh-cut and placed within a vase;
A table cleared, a lamp beside a chair,
And books I long have loved beside me there.
~ Grace Noll Crowell, from I Have Found Such Joy
Notes:
Today I was a believer. Perfection was very near. I could touch it…
This early day in May was very windy, overcast, clouds bundling their way from window to window in a big troubled hurry, the windows clattering.
Today we begin again.
~ Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day (Published April 17, 2018)
The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body,
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
– James Wright, from “The Journey,” Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose
Notes:
And change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn,
and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
~ John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday (1954)
Notes:
the hour of twelve noon
And so you feel
your hair caught up in the sun’s fingers
holding you free in the light and the wind.
~ Yiannis Ritsos, from “Summer,” in Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses
Notes: Poem via the distance between two doors. Photo: Alexander Kozhevnikov (via see more)
Let me seek then,
the gift of silence and solitude,
where everything I touch is turned into a prayer:
where the sky is my prayer,
the birds are my prayer,if
the wind in the trees is my prayer…
— Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
Notes:
I would have them be like the branch of the olive tree.
That one which bides its time.
Then they will feel within them,
like the swirling gust which tests the tree,
the impulse of God’s breath.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from The Wisdom of the Sands
Notes:
I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room
open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.
– Tony Hoagland, from “I Have News For You” in Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty: Poems
Notes: Photo: Dark Mornings. Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels
Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Notes: Quote – Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Scientific American
It’s a gift, this cloudless … morning
warm enough to walk without a jacket
along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing
of your feet through fallen leaves should be
enough to quiet the mind…
The rising wind pulls you out of it,
and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
wheeling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
and lifting above the treetops, as if the whole day
were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
for this moment at least, let it all go.
~ Jeffrey Harrison, from Enough
Notes: Poem from Poets.org. Photo: niaz uddin (Eastern Sierra Mountains)
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