.
* ~  *

from Annie Dillard:
"I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, and whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind rent clouds upstream and down.

Simone Weil says,"Let us love the country of here below. It is real..."

This blog is a place, like a plot of land. I have been away, long. Neglecting here, while tending a "there." What better thought to plant here now, or anywhere...

simply: Love.
Seize the day, the night, indulge your health.







Peace to all who enter here
.

... because truly being here is so much: because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

 

And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,

trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,

in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.

Trying to become it.--Whom can we give it to? We would
hold on to it all, forever... Ah but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window--

But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever ...

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller.... Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.

-Rilke, from "The Ninth Elegy" (Steven Mitchell trans.)
.
Point and shoot--North Carolina, March, 2013.

On this day, I felt a surreal sense of timelessness--everything seemed "lit" even though it was all wet and grey. I should have been gloomy. Maybe it was the wonderful food we got in the city the night before, or maybe the color and rhythm danced me awake. Sometimes the mind, in a state of semi-exhaustion, finds something of Spirit and runs on ahead, loose and unafraid across the fields of our gaze. It feels like inner flight...

You understand.  I hope you are all well.
.
 Note to self: Anne Carson NYT

Peace to all who enter here.
.

a wonderful rare wonderful

. .

Franz Kafka’s "A Country Doctor" short film by Kōji Yamamura. 
Voiced by kyōgen actors of the Shigeyama house. 20 min.
Or view 7m part 1 here, 2, 3.
.
Freshly stolen from The Paris Review Tumblr post today.
Beautiful, profound, intense and a scrambling to logical mind. Be prepared.

(Kafka's translated text : many interpretations

.
"The child is like a little hill of silence.
On this little hill of silence suddenly the word appears.
... The language of the child is silence transformed into sound.
The language of the adult is sound that seeks for silence.
Children--the little hills of silence--are scattered about everywhere in the world of words, reminding men of the origin of speech."

Max Picard from The World of Silence

.
Can I still wish you all a Happy New Year. Can it start right now, this new thing? New dreams new energy new life. Breath for breath, we are so linked in our creation(s

Peace to all who enter here

Circle of light reflecting

 

Sky chord of breathing--

It is old

 

 

and Always Open. Open-ing

 

The within the without--flows between any boundaries made...

 
Earth time. A heat. A sustenance. Family

 

and change.

Hop on. The blur;  It moves. Quickly

but remains, essentially

feathered, season by season ...stillness; flight.

It grazes together on blooms of light;

Etched to remember

rock long stacked by hands.

Old souls. We come from all over...

tangled, rooted.

Given the name, a John Quested: what did he grasp.

 

Hand shaped world-- our marks fade

simply, quietly; an elegance

emerges; leaning   each to each, as we.

One Angel frowns since June 17, 1783.

Primitive the mouth the eyes; all is Spiral

 
and Eternal--these hours; these mirages of color the eye drinks

here where Silence leans on itself, here the majesty--within us
sight, smell, touch stitched to all the emotions of a life.


.
I wish Peace to all who enter here --
and these last lines from Pablo Neruda's poem

"The Gift"

I want all the hands of mankind
to knead mountains
of bread, gather
all fish in the sea,
all the fruit
of the olive,
all the love still unawakened,
and leave
gifts
in the hands of the day.

.
are they open. your hands
willing to give--this awakening love of which we make and are made.
.
I say yes

. & .

"Our world is a voice, a sob, a few holy words." --E. Jabes

The rain makes the most delicate lace.

"Give me your eyes and the separate shall be one." --E. Jabes

"The flower rejects any word which dulls its color." --E. Jabes

I am too small to be wild. Perhaps I am a dove,
born a small while in this coat of thieves. 
..

A friend sat on a bench near the sea to eat lunch. A different woman walked past, smoking a cigarette. Reaching the boardwalk, she flicked her cigarette up in an arch. A seagull swooped down and caught it, then circled around puffing and puffing away.

Who knew!
.
"A smile is a streak of light and liberty." --E. Jabes

* Wendell Berry Essay wise and pertaining (found here)
.
I hope you are all well. That is a little brown fox who visits--the size of a house cat. I feel I could go out and put a flea collar on that beautiful fur and pretend to domesticate. Bad idea. But...

"I want to repeat the words "I love you" until they become spirit." --Helene Cixous

Peace to all who enter here, there and everywhere.

immensity taps at your life

.

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose

That great calm being,
This clutter of soup pots and books--

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Jane Hirshfield
.

St. Helena's Island, South Carolina low country.  The chapel was built in 1740 so the local white workers didn't have to travel into Beaufort for service. Slaves worked the farm land until after the Civil War when an experimental (The Penn School) was set up to educate the "freed" Africans or Gullah.

.

 .

A friend told of poisonous snakes gliding silently off of tree limbs while paddling the local waters. In sandals and a summer dress, I kept an eye out and wished rubber boots to protect my toes. At first...

 Layers and levels of looking up into a new kind of atmosphere.
.

The walls, more white in life, made of local oyster shell, lime and local sand over scaffolding--a construction called Tabby.
.

Slaves probably slurped these, wet and salty. The water (though surrounded by marshy savannah/grass inlets) must have been so clean of pollution in 1740.

The small children's cemetery wall self-planted a fern atop its tabby. Or maybe the ghosts planted it. Is Time a ghost decaying.
.

A soldier's crypt. The door's absence seems a (ghost) legend from the first days of burial. I didn't get too close.
.

Imagined voodoo dolls in the old iron work, loops of rusty thread.
.

The light meter had trouble calculating so much dappled info.
.

The silence here, the layered branches draped with moss, gave sense of an even greater chapel roof stretched over everything below. Me and my littleness. I could feel my heart beat, listening for all the lives that had lived on this island, died here. Slaves lay buried in unmarked graves; war had entered here, voices of love and hate; worship, song, an end of slavery; babies cried, hurricanes, droughts, and a forest fire in 1886 took the roof of this bone-white chapel shell of oyster shells.
The year 1740 seemed to reach through me with all its 270 years since. In a moment it felt I, small flesh, I was the one crumbling--and an oyster shell suddenly seemed strong-wisdom, respectable. Ancient. Bone of my bone.
The sea incarnate.
Immortal.

Compared to me.

Yes. The light was watching through everything, breathing through the moss, offering itself as living luminous prayer among the thriving, throbbing green.
Haunting.
.
Peace to all who enter here.
.