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Joy Sullivan, from “At the Airport”, Instructions for Traveling West

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“Readers didn’t just become more efficient. They also became more attentive. To read a long book silently required an ability to concentrate intently over a long period of time, to ‘lose oneself’ in the pages of a book, as we now say. Developing such mental discipline was not easy. The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness. Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of as much of what’s going on around us as possible….For most of history, the normal path of human thought was anything but linear.

To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained unbroken attention to a single, static object. It required readers to place themselves at what T.S. Elio, in Four Quartets, would call ‘the still point of the turning world.’ They had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another. They had to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater ‘top-down control’ over their attention…What was so remarkable about book reading was that the deep concentration was combined with highly active and efficient deciphering of text and interpretation of meaning. The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author’s words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.

…Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or a replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was—and is—the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading.”

- from The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

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Nancy Willard, from “Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him”

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#pinkswirl #bathtime

‘Evening plans’ by Julia Ockert

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every day

still gone

In the End

What is left to say? In the end, you died. And with your last mouthful of breath you carried away the person you had been, you took away the person I was with you.

At the end, you said, This time I know I am going, and you are staying. But someone unknown to me was the one who survived, saying, If only, if only we were still alive.

— Minnie Bruce Pratt, from Magnified

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Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking (via minima–moralia)

every day you are still gone

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the beauty of a butcher shop . ..

— Traci Brimhall, “Crime and Punishment” from Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod

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listen to me . . .

— Amal El-Mohtar, from This Is How You Lose the Time War (via lunamonchtuna)

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Ether, 2006, Stephanie Valentin

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“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”

— James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin

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Sierra DeMulder, “The Genius Writes a Letter” from New Shoes On A Dead Horse

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clinically proven . . .

spent six hours outside in the sun yesterday. hashtag healed

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so many spots to sit and read a book

so many places to walk to and fro (with a book in tow)

the texture of the place, the stones, the grass, the twiggy fences . . . so many places to run your hands along as you walk

imagine living in a place like this

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a poem . . .

[the title is] A NAME, by Ada Limón

When Eve walked among

the animals and named them -

nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,

fiddler crab, fallow deer -

I wonder if she ever wanted

them to speak back, looked into

their wide wonderful eyes and

whispered, Name me, name me.

– Ada Limón, “A Name”

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this is what i miss most often, in my adult life . . . running errands with friends.  as soon as i could drive, i was running the errands for my mother (happily;it was a new aspect of freedom, to be the decision maker on food, to be known to the bank teller), and with that, i was picking up friends to go along with me.  groceries, or dry cleaning, or the pharmacy, or picking up my sister from softball . . . it could all be communal, so why  not make it so?

https://evelionheart.medium.com/on-the-intimacy-of-the-mundane-863f9efb3c39

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we think differently at night . . .

The twilight is enchanted, bewitched. Let’s stay out awhile. The garden’s suffused in magic. One doesn’t know what beautiful phantom might appear from these purple shadows.

Leonora Carrington, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington; from 'The Sisters', tr. Kathrine Talbot