Month: May 2019
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MayBE 2019: Day Thirty-One
mayBE 2019: day 31 THE MORE LOVING ONE by W.H. Auden Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With […]
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MayBE 2019: Day Thirty
MayBE 2019: May 30 We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an […]
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MayBE 2019: Day Twenty-Nine
MayBE 2019: Day 29 Light and Heat. At dawn, the world rises out of darkness, slowly sense-grain by grain, as if from sleep. Life becomes visible once again. ‘When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying and I can’t think anymore,” Claude Monet once lamented.”More light!” Goethe begged from his […]
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MayBE 2019: Day Twenty-Eight
MayBE 2019: Day 28 I had an inheritance from my father, It was the moon and the sun. And though I roam all over the world, The spending of it’s never done.” ― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls Sometimes I bribe my kids in an unusual and on closer thought, maybe even in […]
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MayBE 2019: Day Twenty-Seven
mayBE 2019: Day 27 Steal Like An Artist. (I stole that from Austin Kleon.) “Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.” – Austin Kleon, Steal Like an […]
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MayBE 2019: Day Twenty-Six
MayBE 2019: Day 26 To some people, this empty room symbolizes something profound, mysterious, and terrifying: the task of starting with nothing and working your way toward creating something whole and beautiful and satisfying. It’s no different for a writer rolling a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter (or more likely firing up the […]
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MayBE 2019: Day Twenty-Five
Questions, Dinner Parties, and Conversation (again). Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart. Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live […]
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MayBE 2019: Day Twenty-Four.
MayBE 2019: Day 24 On Woman. There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question. ― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions I was on the phone with my eldest yesterday and I had to hold back the tears. We had […]
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MayBE 2019: Day Twenty-Three
MayBE 2019: Day 23 GIFTS. My fourth daughter stopped me in our outdoor hallway on the way to pee. “Mama, should I wear sporty clothes today? I mean, are we doing anything active today?” I looked at her confused and said, “What do you mean by active?” “You know, like running and jumping,” she said […]
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MayBE 2019: Day Twenty-Two
MayBE 2019: Day 22 Plate Tectonics and a sixteenth birthday. We have experienced more than a few earthquakes since moving here. A few weeks ago, my daughters were sitting on the beach while the rest of us were bouncing around in the waves of the ocean. They run to the water and ask if we […]