Location: Half inch above the K/T boundary Gender:
Posted:
Jun 27, 2020 - 8:36am
French Chocolates by Ellen Bass
If you have your health, you have everything is something that's said to cheer you up when you come home early and find your lover arched over a stranger in a scarlet thong.
Or it could be you lose your job at Happy Nails because you can't stop smudging the stars on those ten teeny American flags.
I don't begrudge you your extravagant vitality. May it blossom like a cherry tree. May the petals of your cardiovascular excellence and the accordion polka of your lungs sweeten the mornings of your loneliness.
But for the ill, for you with nerves that fire like a rusted-out burner on an old barbecue, with bones brittle as spun sugar, with a migraine hammering like a blacksmith
in the flaming forge of your skull, may you be spared from friends who say, God doesn't give you more than you can handle and ask what gifts being sick has brought you.
May they just keep their mouths shut and give you French chocolates and daffodils and maybe a small, original Matisse, say, Open Window, Collioure, so you can look out at the boats floating on the dappled pink water.
38.9639677,-120.1198166 I go there, sometimes, in a physical sense more often, without thinking so much I'll find myself there for a moment or an hour or a day abandoning the audacity of our mortality peeling away from the harshness of reality I rise through open country skimming past the golden foothills buffeting breezes among the ragged ridge lines above blue waters, across green meadows to that desolate wilderness beyond man's reach pass the end of that narrow bumpy road beyond the narrower windswept trail up the steps built on the back of the father of my fatherâs father to our nest above that cabin in the sky and we fade into alpen glow within the hole bored behind the lightning scar Oh Pinus jeffreyi! Our hardy home we may be fat but we are content to look out upon our favorite view and nestle in for the longest winter of our lives. -W. LeTendre
feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.
If you click on the F it is a Facebook link but then I realized you don't have an account so I'll watch it for you and give you a link to the video when I get one. Stay safe.
Location: 543 miles west of Paradis,1491 miles eas Gender:
Posted:
Apr 16, 2020 - 5:09am
AliGator wrote:
If you click on the F it is a Facebook link but then I realized you don't have an account so I'll watch it for you and give you a link to the video when I get one. Stay safe.
The songs of small birds fade away into the bushes after sundown, the air dry, sweet with goldenrod. Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters flare in the dusk. The aged voices of a few crickets thread the silence. It is a quiet I love, though my life too often drives me through it deaf. Busy with costs and losses, I waste the time I have to be here—a time blessed beyond my deserts, as I know, if only I would keep aware. The leaves rest in the air, perfectly still. I would like them to rest in my mind as still, as simply spaced. As I approach, the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing, poised there, light on the slope as a young apple tree. A week ago I took her away to sell, and failed to get my price, and brought her home again. Now in the quiet I stand and look at her a long time, glad to have recovered what is lost in the exchange of something for money.
I hadn't read that one before. Thanks for sharing it; it's marvelous.
In case you have some spare time tomorrow please check this out.I'll preface by saying this lady survived massacres during the civil war in Liberia and now teaches at Penn State/Altoona.
She having a reading /book launch. I imagine it is powerful stuff...She's a force, goes all over the country doing readings. I'm going to check her out. Cheers.
The songs of small birds fade away into the bushes after sundown, the air dry, sweet with goldenrod. Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters flare in the dusk. The aged voices of a few crickets thread the silence. It is a quiet I love, though my life too often drives me through it deaf. Busy with costs and losses, I waste the time I have to be here—a time blessed beyond my deserts, as I know, if only I would keep aware. The leaves rest in the air, perfectly still. I would like them to rest in my mind as still, as simply spaced. As I approach, the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing, poised there, light on the slope as a young apple tree. A week ago I took her away to sell, and failed to get my price, and brought her home again. Now in the quiet I stand and look at her a long time, glad to have recovered what is lost in the exchange of something for money.
Location: 543 miles west of Paradis,1491 miles eas Gender:
Posted:
Apr 15, 2020 - 2:27pm
AliGator wrote:
:) He really is.
In case you have some spare time tomorrow please check this out.I'll preface by saying this lady survived massacres during the civil war in Liberia and now teaches at Penn State/Altoona.
She having a reading /book launch. I imagine it is powerful stuff...She's a force, goes all over the country doing readings. I'm going to check her out. Cheers.
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life––
What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
As once the winged energy of delight carried you over childhood's dark abysses, now beyond your own life build the great arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed in passing through the harshest danger; but only in a bright and purely granted achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable relationship is not too hard for us; the pattern grows more intricate and subtle, and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictionsâ¦For the god wants to know himself in you.
Stay safe.
