May 31, 2022
Gleanings
- But what is this world, life, trying to wake us up to? And how does remembering we are all connected open possibilities for reimagining the world we … you … I want to live in?
- Whether it’s writing a scene, or revising a story, or playing around with a writing prompt, or creating a blog post. I just feel better if I’ve written something.
- This is a post that begins and ends by saying, “trust me.” This is a post written from a place of pure love. This is a post about how an author can change your life, about how books matter, and about how writers are simultaneously magical and utterly real. It’s also a post that references a line from Jane Austen about how if I loved this book less, I could talk about it more.
- My brain tends toward disaster thinking. What is it good for, disaster thinking? I’d love to learn how to prevent it altogether, but my sense is that instead I’ll have to keep noticing my personal tendency to imagine the worst (in vivid detail) and find ways to turn away from indulging that tendency, over and over. (It helps to have a partner who counters my fears with, “Okay, but what if everything works out?”)
- I constantly remind myself there is no there or arrival point to strive to achieve in any aspect of life, but a returning again and again to each moment, me being me as I am, with you as you are.
- That summer of 2007, we were caught in a meander, the current winding and turning back on itself, not measurable as the crow flies, but singular. In another version of the story, the river erodes the banks, turns, finds another route. In river systems, old meanders are sometimes abandoned and become lakes. That summer is a lake in my memory, forgotten by the river’s flow.
- It’s by coming to the coast where land and sea meet that I’ve learned more about the way the Earth tilts than any lesson taught in school. I’m a hands-on learner.
- “The good news is that the solution to a plant problem is rarely complicated –– often the smallest adjustment can make the biggest change.” Human problems are more complicated, although the same applies; one small adjustment leads to another, and then another, and so on.
- The Awakening, though told with lovely prose and offering insights of a very specific perspective, is only really a partial awakening. Edna Pontellier has a ways to go still.
- As a child, I was a daydreamer, living in my own little world, but now that I am older, I spend more time in the present moment. My mind may drift off these days, but I would not call my thoughts daydreams. What about you? Where does your mind go when it wanders? Do you still daydream?
- On my way into Presqu’ile Provincial Park, and as I pulled away from the gatehouse driving along Presqu’ile Parkway, I felt an ethereal reverence for this place that I love so dearly.
I just have to say that the photo you’ve used for this rich collection of gleanings is really really beautiful.