June 21, 2022
Gleanings
- The practice asks: What’s drawing your attention? The practices reminds me: Follow the energy, write toward that. Trust this time, be in between. Feel, connect. Feel, connect. Be where you are.
- If we can get this right, what else can we get right?
- Walk by peony bushes, now flopped over and spent, their glorious beauty short-lived. Resist the temptation to make comparisons to life and nude seniors playing pickle ball. Some things are better left Uncompared.
- Vacation tastes like the memories of my fifty-five summers, plus the photographs that show fifteen summers prior to that.
- The pleasures of reading silently together as a group all came flooding back, as if the last two years have been some other kind of strange dream.
- I don’t have answers to these questions. I like living in them. I like the possibilities and challenges that the questions represent. I like having different inclinations on different days.
- But what you can’t see is the huge living body of water that holds you up, allows you its currents, its riffles, its history of trout, of kingfishers dipping their beaks, of mergansers and loons in the distance, of crayfish and sticklebacks, of freshwater clams, wild mint in the shallows, the shadows of swallows on the surface as they take insects in flight. Like a river or the ocean, it allows you a place in its living water, and now having entered again, my arms propelling me forward, hands meeting in front of me, then pushing out, a gesture of arrival, in sunlight and rain, I am home in my body within it.
- But the longer I look, the more I understand that he was trying to capture the way the light fell softly over love seat like warm liquid. The whole scene was an attempt to study contrast and light.
