February 1, 2023
Gleanings
- For me, the puzzle represents an acceptance of the messiness of life. Sometimes a piece is missing. Sometimes you just have to give up. Sometimes the demon wins.
- Women hate in each other what we fear in ourselves. Perhaps men do, too, but for women — our hatred of each other keeps men safe. Because it keeps women quiet. Who’s gonna hate you if you keep your mouth shut, your legs closed, your ambition to yourself.…
- There are times when it is impossible to separate the disease from the person it is happening to, and we were in the thick of one of those times. The guilt that surrounds that feeling, the one of wanting to get away from the person you were so terrified of losing only weeks before, is confusing and consuming.
- Heck, the title of this blog is Living Plan B. I know planning is somewhat of a myth, and at this point, I’m fairly adept at the large pivots. Even still, in 2023, at the age of 66, I continue to be sorely disappointed when my plans fall through.
- I finished my 1000th book on Saturday. The Sleep of Apples by Ami Sands Brodoff. I enjoyed the book, a collections of linked stories, but I also got that frisson when I finished it of knowing I had hit 1000. Three diaries, almost 17 years, and 1000 books. I judge myself so harshly for this but also–just so excited for 1001. What is this impulse?
- If photography is fiction, then composition is the initial dishonesty. The lie begins to take shape the moment the photographer aims the camera, imposing his or her arbitrary, exclusionary, restrictive and preferential choices on anyone who later views the image. Vantage point, punctum**, exposure, and focal length (zoom), all combine to determine what is or is not in the shot.
- As most creative people know, when you’re just playing around, goofing about, that’s often when neat stuff happens. You’re open to it, it’s open to you. Who knows. In the next two frames, a couple of birds began to play. You could tell they were riffing off of each other, taking turns perching on the horse. Delightful, yes?
- And I wonder what if … what might become possible, if we see, if we allow those borders between us and within us, not to be impassable walls and boundaries, but simply flowing rivers permeable and unpredictable, constantly changing … sacred waters, inviting us to step in, to cross the threshold and unite what separates you from me, and me from me.
- I wish he had resisted the temptation to republish A Writer’s Diary as a conventional book. He could instead have accepted the ephemerality that is a blog’s most defining quality, letting the posts scroll away as they first appeared, one day at a time.
- I haven’t been feeling like doing very much at all over the past month. I can’t seem to get myself all zizzed up about a new writing project or a visual arts project. I don’t know what this means. Is it simply okay to float aimlessly for a while and produce nothing? It doesn’t feel okay to to me to just be. It’s not in my nature to not be making something or working towards some sort of goal or outcome.
- The train was LONG. Three locomotives to pull it. The conductor sometimes let us get off at stops or when we had to wait for freight trains to pass. There were also lots of stops for the smokers. I jumped around a bit, stretched my back and legs.
