Give Anything to Find That Birdy Boy

[Video: “Hit Like A Girl Contest 2018/Good Times Bad Times – LED ZEPPELIN,” a cover version by one Yoyoka Soma, an eight-year-old drummer. Hit Like a Girl is self-described as “the global online contest for female drummers.” Soma did not “win” HLAG, even in her “Drumset <18” category; I haven’t watched the other videos, but it’s hard to imagine that they all radiate quite this — or this much — spirit.]

From whiskey river:

…joy is not a concept, nor indeed a word, that we are entirely comfortable with, in the present age. The idea seems out of step with a time whose characteristic notes are mordant and mocking, and whose preferred emotion is irony. Joy hints at an unrestrained enthusiasm which may be thought uncool… It reeks of the Romantic movement. Yet it is there. Being unfashionable has no effect on its existence… What it denotes is a happiness with an overtone of something more, which we might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality.

(Michael McCarthy [source])

…and:

Pay attention to the gentle ones,
the ones who can hold your gaze
with no discomfort,
the ones who smile to themselves
while sitting alone
in a coffeeshop,
the ones who walk
as if floating.
Take them in and marvel at them.
Simply marvel.
It takes an extraordinary person
to carry themselves
as if
they do not live
in hell.

(D. Bunyavong [source])

…and:

Advice to the Actress C.N.

Refresh yourself, sister
With the water from the copper bowl with bits of ice in it —
Open your eyes under water, wash them —
Dry yourself with the rough towel and cast
A glance at a book you love.
In this way begin
A lovely and useful day.

(Bertolt Brecht [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Branch Library

I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy
who perched in the branches of the old branch library.

He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks
and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor,

pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching
notes under his own corner patch of sky.

I’d give anything to find that birdy boy again
bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon

with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles,
radiating heat, singing with joy.

(Edward Hirsch, from Special Orders [source])

…and:

Sojourns in the Parallel World

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension—though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it `Nature;’ only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be `Nature’ too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal—then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
—but we have changed, a little.

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

I Am Waiting
(excerpt)

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

(Lawrence Ferlinghetti [source])

…and:

…as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?

(Rebecca Solnit [source])