May 2, 2023
Gleanings
- It’s no picnic, that’s for sure: the unexamined life may not be worth living, but (as I have often thought myself in recent months) surely in many ways it is an easier way to live.
- Blue Portugal & Other Essays is a book I’ve been writing all my life, through all the years that have led to this one, stitched from scraps of beauty and difficulty and love.
- The year is now 2023. Books have been published. Regimes have changed. Children have entered and nearly completed middle school, gray hairs have sprung, betraying, and I believe — I mean, I’m absolutely utterly certain — that this is the final iteration of what I consider to be the perfect homemade hash brown patty….
- What is the relationship between nature and each of these walkers? Is there a melding of purpose and experience, a common recompense on some level? Have any of them met the soul walking upon the path? How aware is each walker, of just how interconnected they are to this woodland? In the simplest of terms, the trees give off the oxygen we breathe in, and absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale – a true symbiotic partnership that has spanned centuries.
- It is what my brain has been like this month. Just flayed, spread out and incapable. (looks like a flower, but carries a whole lot of teeth) while my body does all the things necessary: kids are mostly fed, laundry is done and even folded, sports are attended, jobs are attended, my brain has been uninvolved.
- I share my words with you. You provide me with your thoughts and wisdom. I sit with your words. And I am rewarded with more learning, insights, and additional pieces to the puzzle.
- Do I recommend it? Only if you enter into the experience of reading it with a sense of generosity and curiosity, as if you’re conducting an experiment. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad way to begin reading any book: with generosity and curiosity.
- For me, fourteen years ago when I was desperate to move on from the thing that had consumed my energy for almost a year, meeting an active, healthy person who had done the treatment and gone on to live a good life, inspired me. My hope is that my story in some way inspired them. They certainly inspired me. Out there playing pickleball when they’re still dealing with pulling gauze out of their chest. Now that’s impressive!
- I am sad to report that I have exhausted all of the available fiction by Iona Datt Sharma. But I am overjoyed to have found them in the first place.
- All day, it was like looking through a small microscope, a zoomed in experience of the world. Seeing just a piece, a small part of all of this, of all of us.
