From whiskey river:
We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe.
Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day — the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening?
It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we’re miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn’t seasoned just the way we like.
When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.
In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.
(Mark Nepo [source])
…and:
Place to Be
Days the weather sits
in the endless sky,
the clouds drifting byThe winter’s snow,
summer’s heat,
same street.Nothing changes
but the faces, the people,
all the things they do’spite of heaven and hell
or city hall —
Nothing’s wiser than a moment.No one’s chance
is simply changed by wishing,
right or wrong.What you do is how you get along.
What you did is all it ever means.
(Robert Creeley [source])
Not from whiskey river:
What is IMMEDIATE?
1. Present; at once; without delay ; not deferred by any interval of time. In this sense, the word, without any very precise signification, denotes that action is or must be taken either instantly or without any considerable loss of time. Immediately does not, in legal proceedings, necessarily import the exclusion of any interval of time, it is a word of no very definite signification, and is much in subjection to its grammatical connections.
(Black’s Law Dictionary [source])
…and:
What is REAL?
In Civil Law, relating to a thing (whether movable or immovable), as distinguished from a person.
(Black’s Law Dictionary [source])
…and:
The Late Wisconsin Spring
(excerpt)The loneliness comes and goes, but the blue holds,
Permeating the early leaves that flutter in the sunlight
As the air dances up and down the street. Some kids yell.
A white dog rolls over on the grass and barks once. And
Although the incidents vary and the principal figures change,
Once established, the essential tone and character of a season
Stays inwardly the same day after day, like a person’s.
The clouds are frantic. Shadows sweep across the lawn
And up the side of the house. A dappled sky, a mild blue
Watercolor light that floats the tense particulars away
As the distraction starts. Spring here is at first so wary,
And then so spare that even the birds act like strangers,
Trying out the strange air with a hesitant chirp or two,
And then subsiding. But the season intensifies by degrees,
Imperceptibly, while the colors deepen out of memory,
The flowers bloom and the thick leaves gleam in the sunlight
Of another city, in a past which has almost faded into heaven.
And even though memory always gives back so much more of
What was there than the mind initially thought it could hold,
Where will the separation and the ache between the isolated
Moments go when summer comes and turns this all into a garden?
(John Koethe [source])
…and (emphasis added):
…in the same way that accompanying interfaces can help make the virtual world more psychologically immersive, augmented reality has the potential to make the physical world more psychologically immersive… with paradata about our surroundings we can become more part of them, not less; psychological immersion is increased though immediacy is decreased.
That’s what I’m claiming anyway. Does that sound plausible though?
(Mark Childs [source])
…and:
On Faith
How do people stay true to each other?
When I think of my parents all those years
in the unmade bed of their marriage, not ever
longing for anything else—or: no, they must
have longed; there must have been flickerings,
stray desires, nights she turned from him,
sleepless, and wept, nights he rose silently,
smoked in the dark, nights that nest of breath
and tangled limbs must have seemed
not enough. But it was. Or they just
held on. A gift, perhaps, I’ve tossed out,
having been always too willing to fly
to the next love, the next and the next, certain
nothing was really mine, certain nothing
would ever last. So faith hits me late, if at all;
faith that this latest love won’t end, or ends
in the shapeless sleep of death. But faith is hard.
When he turns his back to me now, I think:
disappear. I think: not what I want. I think
of my mother lying awake in those arms
that could crush her. That could have. Did not.
(Cecilia Woloch, from Late [source])
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About the image: I’ve been salivating for years over the images in the Getty Images collection. Only very recently have they opened the collection for widespread use, by (a) removing the very distracting watermark they’d overlaid over all images (granted, they’d worked in recent years to minimize the obtrusiveness) and (b) including an “embed” option (for Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress-ish blogs. This is my first dive into the Getty waters. Although there’s no way to suppress the credit/marketing text and link, I’m pleased to see that those aren’t as prominent as they might have been. (No plans to use Getty images exclusively, however!)
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