Hard choices on the softest of days . . .
It's the Moon's day . . . storm chances on the increase today and tonight here in TulsyTown . . .
“You’ll stop worrying what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” – David Foster Wallace
Continuing toward Earth Day . . .
How does a body understand itself in environments that leak and twitch and spasm in reaction to extractive capitalism and pollution? Research into embodied cognition and ecology, microbiology and somatics offers a glimmer of something leakier than the modern idea of a self...we are more patterns than we are static matter. Our cells reshuffle every seven years...Our carbon-bound, cellular being has a root system that stretches [from mycelia] all the way to the sun. – Sophie Strand, The Body is an Ecotone.
There is … a singular disorientation to those moments when [words] fail us — when these prefabricated containers of language turn out too small to contain emotions at once overwhelmingly expansive and acutely specific. – Maria Popova referencing John Koenig's The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, in her latest edition of The Marginalian, 14 April 2024.
How does it feel to be free? Freud was the supreme cynic of the psyche. – Maria Popova, The Marginalian, 4.14.24
Softest of Mornings
What will you do today, I wonder,
… no doubt clocks are ticking loudly
all over the world.
… How shall I move away from the flowers?
How shall I go on, with my introspective
and ambitious life?
– Mary Oliver, Long Life, Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2005.
Next time . . .
It's really Sol's day . . . Summertime 90's and strong Southerlies are Okieland features today . . .
and the epitome of of flotsam and jetsam yang and yin characterized the mailbox this morning . . .
It was on this day in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., just five days after the surrender of the Civil War's Confederate leader, General Lee.
Tonight in 1912 the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on its way from Southampton, England, to New York City, on its maiden voyage and carrying more than 2,000 people.
The stellar British and American film and stage actor Julie Christie turns 84 today. She was born on this day in 1940 Assam, India.
Also born on this date was John Gielgud, another extraordinary British stage and film actor and director. He was born in 1904, London, England.
You really ought to meet Elizabeth Warren, an Okie by birth and childhood.
A week away from Earth Day... and the earth has started the observation early: Death Valley is in the midst of a “superbloom.”
These are the days …
Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures. – Vincent van Gogh
Next time, fail better. – Samuel Beckett
Unforgettable . . .
It's a Satyr's day … here in Okieland, strong Southerlies bring mid 80's to the weekend.
It's Thomas Jefferson's birthday , born 281 years ago today in 1743 Albemarle County, Virginia.
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort built on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor. – Heather Cox Richardson, writing on her blog Letters from an American.
The web does not create a public. – Nathan Gardels, in Noēma, 4.13.24
Today is the 118th anniversary of Samuel Beckett's birth. The Irish playwright, novelist, poet and literary legend was born on this date in 1906 Dublin, Ireland.
And it's also the birthdate of Eudora Welty. The short story/novelist was born 115 years ago today in 1909, Jackson, Mississippi.
I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine . . . "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.
— — —
For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.
— — —
What was that unforgettable line?
– Samuel Beckett