May 3, 2022
Gleanings
- Give me ordinary. Give me cups of tea in the backyard and an afternoon so slow I can hear the hummingbirds. Give me time to look at the moon and midday trips to the bookshop. Give me satisfaction with Enough. (via ARB)
- My mother died in 2003, ravaged by Alzheimer’s, which robbed her of memory but not of her spirit. “There was a terrible war, here,” she told me, pointing at bullet holes that still mark the facades of old Wrocław buildings. “Terrible things happened. Terrible.” By then, she did not know she had a daughter, but the memories of the war lingered in her mind.
- There is a suddenness to beauty, a shock to it. I sometimes think I’m quite dulled to the world these days, but then it happens, I’m pulled through, and that reminds me what I’m here for.
- Purple, acid yellow and milky white. I can’t imagine how many seed species there are on earth, and like the urchins, how much variety exists in each one’s appearance, both subtle and dramatic. It blows my mind.
- For I know I can’t make time slow, but I can lean into inhabiting the ever-present nowness, the slices of the day.
- Earlier in the day when we had first pulled out the map book, we looked at the grid the lines that marked the roads and then out at the prairies that surrounded us and wondered if there was anything out there. And the answer is yes, there much to be seen and much more to be imagined.
- It has been extraordinarily hard navigating the tightrope between expressing myself truthfully, and not hurting my mom’s feelings.
- Imagine, I always said, the death of a child. How terrible. How terribly sad.
- All through the 1st year of the pandemic, when we didn’t see anyone apart from masked cashiers in the grocery store and the masked lifeguards at the pool, I was so grateful for the company of jays.
