This Here, This Now, This You

[Image: Untitled photograph by Mike Liu; it was taken in 2016, at San Francisco International Airport. (I found it on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license –thank you!) About the image, the photographer says only: “I always seem to take the same photograph from the same spot of the same subject after getting off the plane. It is because I think the airport is a place of minor miracles, where connections are lost and made and reunions are the everyday trade.”]

From whiskey river (first paragraph):

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.

For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you accomplish with your life, nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulation. Well done. You really are special.

(Bill Bryson [source])

…and (last four stanzas):

Roses, Late Summer

What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can’t sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley.
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of the light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn’t mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.

(May Sarton [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Forgiving the Darkness

Darkness is not a death, does not obliterate,
will not bury you or take your breath away.
Darkness will not erase you the way it erases day with night
because darkness is not the clock but merely the time
falling away from the clock’s circular face.
Darkness is not the loss but the thing misplaced,
not the hammer but the nail in its curved emergence
from wood’s grasp, not the storm’s insurgence
but the limbs broken off from their miraculous
suspension in a storm out far, beyond us.
Darkness is not about hearts, imperfect as they are,
but what leaks through their incorrigible doors, not the stars
but the glissade or glide of their dust.
Darkness no longer shields the hunters’ musk
in search of you, or turns you to animal prey,
it is only a measure of weight or days.
Not something without a beginning or an end,
it is not even—especially not—an end.
Nor is it vertigo, nor the whole, but merely a piece.
No, darkness is but a ghost of an idea, the least
remembered, most estranged prayer, and your fear
but a lingering, limbic fear torn from shreds of forgotten years.
Only that much is clear.

(Alice B. Fogel [source])

…and:

Alice’s eyes fluttered open once, twice, three-four times. In the half-instant before she fully awoke, a blurry certainty stumbled into her mind that she had seen—well, something.
She could not put a name to it: no shadowy, ski-masked human figure by her bedside or fleeing out the window; no bogeyman in the closet. But there had been something, damn it, some thing, some compact physical presence just off to one side of the bed, a concrete precipitate of her sleeping mind.

She switched on the reading lamp affixed to the headboard. Hoisted herself into sitting position. Looked around the bedroom.

Gray, cloudy-summer morning light filtered in through the bedroom window as if to placate her with little fragments of reassuring ordinariness. Here, said the morning light. Here is your bureau, and all the little doo-dads cluttering up its top. The loose change, the jumble of unmatched and mismatched earrings, the box of facial tissues, the picture of Pete and you at the guest house in the mountains. The coffee mug, patinaed inside with a hardened tan goo from over a week ago. And here, the nightstand, the pile of books on the floor, the bed, the comforter, and over there your dumb old hot-raspberry furry slippers and an armchair and a floor lamp and a wastebasket jammed to the brim with glossy Sunday newspaper ads and balled-up tissues, and on the walls familiar framed prints and a mirror. All real, and you remember all this, right?

Nothing new, the morning light said; nothing unexpected. See? No mysterious Somethings. Go back to sleep.

Alice did close her eyes for an instant. She licked her lips and swallowed, and then opened her eyes again, silenced the now-shrieking alarm, and swung her feet out of bed.

(JES, “The Iron”)