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16th April | Nostalgic spring mind for paths untaken.

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“Listening to her, I imagined a butterfly’s wings fluttering inside of her voice.”

— Dunya Mikhail, from The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq (New Directions, 2018)      

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Haiku 001

Restlessly pacing

Another old man with a

Radio signal

— Flat Iron Square, London

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You don’t get better on the days when you feel like going. You get better on the days when you don’t want to go, but you go anyway. If you can overcome the negative energy coming from your tired body or unmotivated mind, you will grow and become better. It won’t be the best workout you have, you won’t accomplish as much as what you usually do when you actually feel good, but that doesn’t matter. Growth is a long term game, and the crappy days are more important.

Georges St Pierre, The Way Of The Fight (via wordsnquotes)

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“And yet, as they say, the heart is a leaf and the wind makes it throb.”

—

Pablo Neruda, from “14,” Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda, transl. by Forrest Gander (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

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Before evening. And fog. The life you only recognize by having had light at all.

— Alex Dimitrov, from “The Sun,” published in The Cincinnati Review

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My Life's Hope, S.W.Hands

When my fleeting adventure fades to black,

And my lungs, aching with song have drawn their final, unburdened breath,

When my failing eyes, still bright with the awe of vistas they beheld, have looked upon the last infinite, ebony sky,

When my weathered feet, crooked and cracked by backstreets sauntered and foothills climbed to touch the sun, have crossed the crimson tape at world’s end,

I hope, oh how I hope that the man with whom my fortunate path did cross will think of me and say,

“He left this place better than when he found it.”

S.W.Hands, 2010

http://www.sihands.com

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“I train my heart to love in order to accommodate roses and thorns”

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“I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world.”

Kip, from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

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Sunday afternoons.

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“We realise that manipulation and control are not the ultimate joy of life— to become real, to learn to take a stand, to develop one’s centre, to support our total personality, a release to spontaneity— yes, yes, yes.”

Bruce Lee (1940 - 1973)

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How Orwell Was Doing 70 Years Ago Today

I’m sorry to hear about your illness. My own seems to be getting better rapidly. They can’t say yet whether the streptomycin is doing its stuff, but I certainly have been a lot better the last week or so. I imagine however that I shall be in bed for another month or two, & under treatment at any rate until the summer. The lung has been collapsed, which is supposed to give it a better chance to heal, but of course it takes a long time, & meanwhile they have to keep on pumping air into one’s diaphragm. Fortunately this is a very nice hospital & very well run. Everyone is extraordinarily kind to me. It is sad I cannot see my little boy until I am non-infectious, however he will be able to come & visit me when I’m allowed out of doors. He is getting on for 4 & growing enormously, though he is a bit backward about talking, because we live in such a solitary spot that he doesn’t see enough of other children. I have got our place in Jura running pretty well now. I myself couldn’t farm the land that went with the house, but a young chap who was wounded in the war lives with us & farms it. We are pretty well found there, & better off for fuel & food than one is in London. The winters are also not quite so cold, funnily enough. The chief difficulties are that in bad weather one is sometimes cut off from the mainland, & that one is chronically short of petrol. However one can use a horse if one is obliged to. Of course I have to go up to London occasionally, but the journey only takes 24 hours, less if one flies. I was half way through a novel when I took to my bed. It ought to have been finished by May — possibly I might finish it by the end of 1948 if I get out of here by the summer.

— George Orwell in a March 5, 1948 letter to John Middleton Murry from a Scotland hospital.

In Remembering Orwell, Professor James Williamson, who was a junior doctor in the Thoracic Unit at Hairmyres Hospital where Orwell was a patient describes Orwell’s condition and treatment:

It was a fairly trivial operation: you could do it in five minutes. You just pull the muscle aside, expose the nerve, and tweak it with a pair of forceps. The patient would get one sudden pain, and the diaphragm would jump, and that was the diaphragm paralyzed for three to six months, until the nerve recovered again. Then we pumped air into his abdomen. The diaphragm was pushed up by this, and the lungs were collapsed. You put anything from four hundred to seven hundred cc of air in, under low pressure, with a special machine, through a needle which was a fairly elephantine-looking thing, a hollow needle about three inches long, actually. The first time you did it, you used a local anesthetic, because you had to go very cautiously and advance it very slowly. But after that you just stuck it in, because patients agreed that if it was done expertly, one sharp jab was better than all this fiddling about with anesthetics and things.

I remember he used to dread each ‘refill’ and couldn’t relax at all when he was on the table. But he never complained. In fact we all noticed how much self-control he had. There was never a gasp, or any kind of noise from him when we did this.

I don’t think he would ever have been terribly infectious. The person who is highly infectious is the person who is coughing a lot, whose sputum has a lot of TB bacilli in it. He wasn’t coughing a lot, nor was his sputum, as I remember it, terribly strongly positive. But he would still be a potential danger to other people, particularly to young people like his son.

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Donegal, a little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines. 1st January 2018. (at Donegal, Ireland)

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“Connect with people who remind you of what you truly are.” — Ralph Smart (at Northern Ireland)

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Wake up to the sound of your fleeting heart #thepaperkites #featherstone (at Try Dowr)

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Find balance in your life. Work hard but don’t let work take over your life, you will lose yourself. Love, but love for the right reasons. Life is too short for anything mediocre. Know who you are and know that you are worthy of reaching your dreams and that it is never too late to start creating that life you have always dreamed of. Do not compare yourself to others, that’s just deadly. No two souls are the same. You are your own person, you are beautiful and you are unique. Put your trust in the universe. Some things are just meant to happen, and some are not. Let go of whatever is stealing your happiness, it’s hard but it is worth it. Embrace change. Embrace life. Everything happens for a reason, sometimes you just need to breathe, trust and let go.

Charlotte Freeman (via wordsnquotes)

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I place on the altar of dawn: The quiet loyalty of breath, The tent of thought where I shelter, Waves of desire I am shore to And all beauty drawn to the eye. May my mind come alive today To the invisible geography That invites me to new frontiers, To break the dead shell of yesterdays, To risk being disturbed and changed. May I have the courage today To live the life that I would love, To postpone my dream no longer But do at last what I came here for And waste my heart on fear no more.

​John O'Donohue 

Excerpt from, ‘A Morning Offering’ BENEDICTUS (Europe) / TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US 

(via abiding-in-peace)