I saw a hawk swoop down driveway and land in pine tree across street; I got close to him and saw feathery ruffles in the wind and silhoutte of very big creature... 2 feet for sure.
this is the week that puddles frozen, thawed, froze again; the day when strong winds from north made 27 degrees feel like 17
Lyndon Johnson was behind in the final stretch of his first campaign for Congress. He made two improvements, according to Robert Caro. He doubled down on referring to General Burleson's support (workers of his campaign scattered through the audience would should "General Burleson is right." Another would should back "Let's send a young man to Congress." A third would should "Let's do what Burleson says!"
The other improvement was provided by his father.
There was a tactic, Sam Johnson said, that could make the leaders' opposition work for him, instead of against him. The same tactic, Sam said, could make the adverse newspaperpolls work for him, instead of against him. It could even make the youth issue work for him. If the leaders were against him, he told his son, stop trying to conceal that fact; emphasize it -- in a dramatic fashion. If he was behind in the race, emphasize that -- in a dramatic fashion. If he was younger than the other candidates, emphasize that.
If no leader would introduce Lyndon [at a speech], Sam said, he should stop searching for mediocre adults as substitutes, but instead should be introduced by a young child, an outstanding young child.And the child should introduce him not as an adult would introduce him, but with a poem, a very special poem.
And that's what Johnson did, to great effect.
New things I learned: ARRAYFORMULA, SPARKLINE, and making a curved line graph of % of goals done each day and embedding it exactly where I want it in the sheet.
I had to rewatch the GIFs a number of times (without glasses, squinting at the screen) to see the formulas, then read more about the formula, then trial and error.
I had already built this paper version of a habit tracker that is, itself, a pretty revised version of something I've been doing... since I was 10.
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| Earth, photographed by Apollo astronauts (NASA) |
i do not want to be merely tolerated or accepted. what miserably low standards. i want to be celebrated. i wanted to be asked serious questions. i want to be asked about my dreams and desires, my sorrows and my favorite trees. i want to be wanted. actively. abundantly. today.
Adam Grant's podcast "Re:thinking" had a segment on Celeste Ng whose new book is "Our Missing Hearts." Here's the transcript.
On Noticing & Lowering the Filters
I think that's right though. One of the things that I love just is noticing stuff, and it's for better or for worse, it's, it's one of my, my quirks. And if you go on a walk with me, or you spend any time with me, you will probably be treated to a plethora of just little things that I notice that are really not relevant to whatever it is that we're actually doing. But that's sort of how my brain works.
If you walk around with a toddler, and I am, I realize as I dive into this, comparing myself to a toddler, but the toddler toddlers are always like, “Oh my God, look at that. Wow, look at this. Hey, look at that. Hey, there's a crack in the sidewalk. Oh, look at this. Hey, that grass is really tall. Did you know grass could get that tall? I think it's taller than me.” You know, this constant stream of observations that I think for, for most of us as adults, we learn to, um, tamp down for, for lack of a better term. You, you can't be commenting on that all the time. And one of the joys of being a writer is that I get to indulge that noticing aspect. I get to write it down and then ideally I get to take some of those things that I notice and try and find a little bit of meaning in them. Um, it's rare for adults, I think, to get a moment to slow down and notice. We’re, we have to move faster because there are things we have to do. And I like it when any kind of art, music, visual art, poetry, novels can stop you and go, “Hey, look at this for a minute.”
On Lowering the Filters
Adam Grant: One of the things that I think is unusual about you, compared to other people who have that noticing skill, is they have a hard time raising their attentional filters. Like I know a lot of people who are very good at noticing, who can't stop noticing. They can't turn it off. And they end up being incredibly creative, curious minds, uh, with less to show for their time than they hoped in a lot of cases, right? And here you are kind of lowering the filters, noticing these things, but then raising them and saying, “I'm gonna write a story and it's gonna move people.” Do you have habits or strategies for navigating that tension? Is there a tension there?
On Writing as a process for crystalizing ideas
Adam Grant: I think it is and it isn't. So on the one hand, I, I strongly agree. I think that a lot of people see writing as a vehicle for communicating ideas. But it's also a tool for crystallizing ideas.So often I find that what's fuzzy in my head becomes clear on the page. And that when I try to write down, you know, an inkling, it could become an insight, or in some cases, I'll see the gap in my knowledge or my logic, or when I'm trying to spell something out in writing, I have to articulate my assumptions. I have to address counterarguments, and I guess I think a lot about the observation of how can I know what I think until I see what I say.
Advance the plot or reveal character
Grant: Vonnegut said that every sentence should advance plot or reveal character. Ng: I think he's right, but I think those categories are very broad, and so sometimes, you know, you have a sentence that is there kind of just for decoration and beauty, but in a way that's, that's telling you something about the plot and the character.
On Learn to Write/Tracing
Grant: What surprised you that you learned being trained in the formal skill of writing that you didn't know going in?
Celeste Ng: I think one of the things that surprised me, related to what we were talking about, is that how much of writing is reading. And that writing, you know, it wasn't just that I needed to be sat down and made to write a lot of stories, although I was, and that helped a lot, but I learned so much from reading things that I wouldn't ordinarily have picked up. You know, books that I was assigned, or books that my friends or people in my cohort recommended and I went, “I've never heard of that. Let me go read it.”
Um, that was as much of the educational experience as being in the class, and that is said with no disrespect to my amazing teachers in the classes where I really learned a lot, but that I learned so much from other writers and I learned partly by imitating and then partly by shaping myself against other people. Not to say, you know, I don't like what you do, but I was like, “Oh, you're writing about that, but that's, that's not what's drawing me. What is drawing me?” And I had to figure that out.
And I really started to think of writing as something almost collaborative in that way. You don't always work with someone else on the page, but you're almost always in conversation with something when you're writing, or someone. And in that sense, it is a collaboration. You're speaking to someone or you're trying to explain someone to someone else. There's always another party in there that's, that's kind of part of that circuitry.
Adam Grant: When you talk about imitating, I think about, uh, Malcolm Gladwell literally learning to write by typing out William F. Buckley novels and getting a feel for the, the arc of a, a story. I, I imagine you didn't do it that literally, did you?
Celeste Ng: I didn't do it that literally. No. But I know a lot of writers who do that, who, um, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's not alone in kind of typing sentences that he loves and admires. I, I know a lot of writers who have done that, um, in one way or another. Even as simple as there's a poem you love or a passage you love and you copied into your notebook to keep it for later.
There is something about retracing the rhythm of those words that you know, this, this will be fodder for future neuroscientists, but I don't know if you are kind of engraving a neural pathway. I don't know what it is that you're doing. But, something about the act of going over those words again, whether you're rereading them over, whether you're copying them, whether you're typing them out, um, it kind of teaches, you almost like the rhythm. It, like it's learning how to improvise on the piano, kind of like that. Um, so for me, when I was imitating. It was more that I would read a book or a story that kind of blew my mind and I would go, “Well, I didn't know you were allowed to do that. I wanna do that.” You know, and then I would try to do that. And of course, what came out even when I was trying to imitate, would be very different. But it was my way of kind of feeling out what I wanted to do.
Adam Grant: It's fascinating how you called that tracing, because it, it makes me think immediately of learning to draw: where the first thing that you do, if you're trying to learn a new technique as an artist, is to trace someone else's work. And that's part of building your skill. We're not taught to do that as writers.
Celeste Ng: No, and I, you know, when you said tracing, it reminded me also of being taught to write cursive.
I remember, in I would say about second or third grade, having to trace. Here's the letter A. Trace these, and then it would go to just dots and it would go to just the lines, and you'd have to kind of create them on your own. And we're, I, I don't think most kids are taught to do that. At least my son is not.
So you're right. There is something about, again, just kind of following in the footsteps or in the pen marks of someone else that I think is an important part of figuring out. You're like, “I don't want my line to go there. I wanted to go a different way.” But that's, you've learned something there too.
Adam Grant: So tracing seems like a beginner skill in a way. If you move to the intermediate level I think the next phase, at least for me as a writer, and I'm not the kind of writer that you are in any way, shape, or form, but, one of the things that, that I found enormously helpful was to internalize the style and taste of other writers, and then think through how would they tell this story? Where would they begin? What would the reveal be for them?
And you know, that, that gave me, it felt like it gave me more degrees of freedom. To say, “Oh, now I could think of telling the same story seven different ways.” Or “Maybe now I'm actually not focusing on the right character at all or the right story at all because I've internalized the point of view of a particular writer I admire. Um, and now I can imagine a possibility I wouldn't have seen before.” Did, did you go through a phase like that as well?
Celeste Ng:Yeah, I think I did and thought of it as almost reverse engineering what writers that I loved were doing. So, for example, um, when I started writing, um, when I was writing my first novel, Everything I Never Told You, I eventually realized that I wanted to tell it in this omniscient point of view because I realized that this book was gonna be about secrets and nobody in the family knew everything. But somebody had to know these things and that person was gonna be the narrator. That was gonna be the person who was gonna help the reader put it together. And I was really scared because I did not know how to do that.
And so what I did was I went to my bookshelf and I pulled down some books that I love. So I pulled down Oliver Twist by Dickens. I pulled down the God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I pulled down Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. You know, all these books that were told in that point of view. And I looked at their first few pages to go, “Okay, how did they do this? How did they create that voice? How did they structure the book? How did you know-- just can I look at all of these examples and distill from that any kind of guideline about how to put it together?”
And that's been, I feel like one of, one of the ways that I learn from other writers now very concretely, is I go, “Ooh, you're doing something cool. How did you do that? Let me study it.” And then maybe I can start to use those principles that this other writer has taught me for my own purposes.
On Being a Critic and a Fan
Celeste Ng: It's hard to turn off the writer part of my brain and just be a reader. In fact, I know that a book has really hooked me if I'm not thinking at all about any of the stylistic choices that the writer has made. Um, and it's rare, but it's a huge compliment. Like, "Oh, this book is doing something.” And I'll tell my husband, like, “I was not thinking about any of the writer stuff at all.” And he'll immediately take the book from me and go read it.
I'm getting better at sort of just seeing how books are put together. And so when I'm reading, there's a little part of my mind that's always registering that people that I know and love who really get music, my, my son is one of them they can kind of hear things in music that I can't. And I imagine this might be what the experience of listening to music might be like for them. They're appreciating it and enjoying it in similar ways that I am with my no musical knowledge, but there might maybe also be hearing ike, “Ooh, there's an interesting chord progression.” Or “Ooh, it changed to a minor key.” Or, “Oh, you modulated, you know?” Or, “Ooh, the rhythm changed here.”
You know, things that I can't hear, but they're aware of, and I imagine, I hope for them, it adds a different level of understanding to the piece, and that's sort of what reading is for me. Ideally, those two things are running in parallel. I'm enjoying it on the story level and the readerly level, but then I'm also enjoying it on a writerly level as I'm going, “Ooh, interesting move that you made here. Ooh, we've switched into the second person.” Or, “Oh, I didn't even notice. When did you do that?” I'll go back and look and then I start kind of reverse engineering again and figuring out how they did it.
Adam Grant: This actually speaks to some recent research. I think the paper was called “Emotionally Numb,” and it was about the trade-offs between expertise and enjoyment. Hmm. It turned out that the more you learned about movies or photography or wine, the less you enjoyed them. Because they started to become critics instead of fans. it sounds like you've learned to avoid that.
Celeste Ng:And I feel like maybe one of the keys is to try and hold onto that joy and that discovery. And one nice thing about being a writer is that people are always doing new stuff. There's always new ideas and there's always sort of new things out there that are gonna catch you. And so you can always, there's always space to be surprised and I feel like when you were surprised, that's when you learn something. Um, and that's one of the joys for me. I mean, that's why I still read. Even as I have become a writer, because there's cool new stuff out there, and I, I kind of wanna see it. So I'm, I'm gonna keep that in mind and, and keep trying to hold onto that, that toddler excitement. Oh my God, there's a crack in the sidewalk. I've never seen a crack in the sidewalk before. Right? But that's--
Right? Why is there a crack in the sidewalk? Like, who put it there? Will it ever be there? Right. All the questions that toddlers ask you, where you're like, “I, I don't know, honey, let's go. It's a crack in the sidewalk.” In some ways, like, I get to indulge myself as a writer and say, “That's part of my job is to get to linger in these very small kind of unimportant details.” To keep the curiosity alive
From @jhalifax
A practice: Gratefulness
Gladdening the heart with a deep inhale and relaxed exhale.
May I be grateful for this life.
May I be grateful for all those in my life.
May I be grateful for the lessons given to me.
May I be grateful that I have the heart to serve.
The mob within the heart (1745)
The mob within the heart
Police cannot suppress
The riot given at the first
Is authorized as peace
Uncertified of scene
Or signified of sound
But growing like a hurricane
In a congenial ground.
-Emily Dickinson
One of the things I like about meditation/Buddhist practices is the metaphoric nature of the teaching: "Naming the dragon," "unfinished business of the heart"
It is key to keep company with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
-Epictetus
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
-George Eliot
(found in Kleon Twitter)
“Writing or making anything — a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake — has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.”
—Sharon Olds
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| Philip Glass feeding pigeons with his kids. |
Parents, teachers, and managers often intervene by offering either a directive or an evaluation (i.e., judgment), apparently assuming that the only alternative is to stand by silently. But what if they asked simply, "How can I help?" - Alfie Kohn Tweet
This website has a list of all of Domenico Scarlatti's piano pieces, ranged by playing difficulty. I like this concept. Here's a subpage about my favorite piece, the one I'm working on on guitar.
And this page has a few thousand works by a variety of composers.
And this page talks about the describes the different elements that are considered in the difficulty scale. This page also has an example snippet from each of the levels of the scale - 1 to 5 (going up by .5)
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| American photographer William Smith |
Some recent meditation instruction that seems worth recording
Joseph Goldstein -
1. Greet your partner with a kiss, kind words, and a conversation
2. Two minutes of undistracted conversation. two minutes of undistracted communication can be more important than spending a whole unfocused week together as a couple.
3. Practice an appreciation ritual. Tell your partner what you love about them, and why. It’s important to find ways to genuinely communicate affection and appreciation toward your partner. Not only does this make your partner feel valued, but it also enables you to see the positive traits of your partner, instead of focusing on the negative.
4. Create more positive interactions. Dr. John Gottman terms this the “magic ratio” or “the 5:1 ratio” and uses a banking metaphor to describe it. If you have five or more positive interactions for every one negative interaction, then you’re making regular deposits into your emotional bank account, which keeps your relationship in the green.
5. Date your partner. Regularly dating your partner allows you to stay close and knowledgeable about each other’s lives. It reminds you why you love your partner! You can never stop learning about one another, and dating your partner allows you to share more about your family histories, spiritual beliefs, financial practices, and sexual preferences.Doing little things for your partner and surprising them with new experiences makes your partner feel loved and appreciated. Why wouldn’t you want to make your partner feel loved? Regularly dating your partner at every stage of your relationship can lead to more intimacy and romance! Spending intentional time together leads to better communication and gives you something to talk to your partner about.
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| a Gregorian calendar via Alamy |
Roughly every four years, an extra day gets tacked onto the end of February, a time-keeping convention known as the leap year. The practice of adjusting the calendar with an extra day was established by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago and modified in the 16th century by Pope Gregory XIII, bequeathing us the Julian and Gregorian calendars.That extra day is a way of aligning the calendar year of 365 days with how long it actually takes Earth to make a trip around the sun, which is nearly one-quarter of a day longer. The added day ensures that the seasons stay put rather than shifting around the year as the mismatch lengthens.Humanity struggles to impose order on the small end of the time scale, too. Lately the second is running into trouble. Traditionally the unit was defined in astronomical terms, as one-86,400th of the mean solar day (the time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis). In 1967 the world’s metrologists instead began measuring time from the ground up, with atomic clocks. The official length of the basic unit, the second, was fixed at 9,192,631,770 vibrations of an atom of cesium 133. Eighty-six thousand four hundred such seconds compose one day.But Earth’s rotation slows ever so slightly from year to year, and the astronomical second (like the astronomical day) has gradually grown longer than the atomic one. To compensate, starting in 1972, metrologists began occasionally inserting an extra second — a leap second — to the end of an atomic day. In effect, whenever atomic time is a full second ahead, it stops for a second to allow Earth to catch up. Ten leap seconds were added to the atomic time scale in 1972, and 27 more have been added since.
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“What was before just a way of measuring the flow of time is today essential for transportation, location, defense, finance, space competition,” said Felicitas Arias, former director of the time department of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, known as B.I.P.M. from its French name and based outside Paris. “Time is ruling the world.”
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The resolution severs the timekeeping of atoms from the timekeeping of the heavens, probably for generations to come.
Spring
by Mary Oliver
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
I found this poem through Twitter, specifically, through the lines: "There is only one question//How to love this world."
That's it. The single question.
I also love the second highlighted part; that we share in the wildness of the world, alongside the poetry, music, and glass cities.
(Source)
One such study from 2013 led by a team of biomedical engineers in Finland sought to explain where emotions are felt in the body.
They mapped bodily reactions to emotions in about 700 individuals by asking them to color in regions where they felt reactions increasing or decreasing due to various stimuli.
The team showed the volunteers two blank silhouettes of person on a screen and then told the subjects to think about one of 14 emotions: love, disgust, anger, pride, etc. The volunteers then painted areas of the body that felt stimulated by that emotion. On the second silhouette, they painted areas of the body that get deactivated during that emotion.
Not everybody painted each emotion in the same way. But when the team averaged the maps together, signature patterns emerged for each emotion. The team published these sensation maps Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Additionally, the same researchers conducted a follow-up study that found the intensity of a feeling directly correlated with the intensity of physical and mental sensations.
They categorized feelings into five groups:
Feelings are ever-changing, and this research may be helpful for those who have trouble understanding their emotions.
Ever feel like you need to cry, scream, laugh, punch a pillow, or dance it out?
We’re often taught to bury our pain and soldier on. Over time, this can lead to repressed emotions, also known as unconscious avoidance.
Research from 2019 linked emotional repression with decreased immune system function.
Here are a few ways to release repressed emotions:
These are the ones I liked:
1. Start strong. (central image should suggest central theme and prompt intrigue)
2. Start late. A story should start as late as possible and occur over the shortest reasonable span of time. (otherswise feels slack)
3. Show, don't tell. Film is a visual medium. SHOW rather than explain. (good graphic here for showing not telling)
8. Conceal the action. Curiosity and intrigue are best provoked by placing the audience a step away from the action. (conversation filmed through crack in the door might be better than ful view... aphysical attack may be more brutal when heard not seen.)
9. Discover the action. "discovery shots" either stay in one place while action goes around in and out of frame, moving in and out of frame. or searches the room, panning (moving discovery shot v. fixed discovery shot)
22. Plot is physical events. Story is emotional events. Plots is what happens in a movie; story is how the characters feel about what happens.
23. Story concerns the specific characters in a film; theme concerns the universal human condition.
25. Make an entrance memorable. Your protagonist's character, style, and behavior must be distinctive from the moment we first lay eyes on him or her. Does he trip on a carpet snag? Did she forget to remove a hair curler?
29.Props reveal character. (prop is any object physicallly handed by an actor, including elements of wardrobe)
33. Every scene must reveal new information. A movie presents a problem, its eventual solution requires that new infomration be made available to both characters and viewers. .. it need not be a bombshell, but should be specific; and if not pure, objective informmation, it can be about how different characters perceive or react to the same information.
34. Every scene must contain conflict. (contribute to the building and intensifying of conflict)
37. Make setting a character. (climate, topography, .ighting... dialect, clothing, personal spaces) setting could be vistas, cityscape... .but also details, a rusty fishing vessel, a fisherman, a loon taking flight, a weather-beaten street sign.
51. "All great work is preparing yourself for the accident waiting to happen." - Sidney Lumet
76. Rhythm and tempo. rhythm is the pattern created by the duration of the individual scenes in a film. a scene typically alast from 15s to 3 m, the shorter the scenes and more cuts from scene to scene, the fast a film's rhythm. rhtyhm should vary of the course of a film; a movie edited at the same rhythm will seem interminable; tempo is the pace within a schene... it is determined by the rate of saction as well as the number of cuts between view of it. Fast tempos can be exciting... or disorienting. Slow tempo allow snuances of character... but impatience.
81. "I would never write about someone who is not at the end of his rope." - Stanley Elkin
“In mystical traditions, it is one’s own readiness that makes experiences exoteric or esoteric. The secret isn’t that you’re not being told. The secret is that you’re not able to hear.”
— Ram Dass
This NYT article answers that question.
My first attemp at the workout left me tired after 2 rounds So his 6 rounds sounds intense!
The workout is: Five body weight squats, five push-ups and a 30-second plank — repeated six times, resting for no more than 30 seconds between rounds. If you can’t do a push-up on the floor, do it against a countertop or a stable bench. You can modify the plank by putting your knees on the floor or doing a standing plank by placing your forearms on the wall.
If this is easy for you, Mr. Howell said, you can ramp up the intensity by trying 10 squats, 10 push-ups and a 60-second plank — repeated 10 times. If you have access to a dumbbell or kettlebell, Mr. Howell suggested throwing them into the mix. You can change the body weight squats to goblet squats, holding a kettlebell or dumbbell in both hands at chest level as you squat. Set a timer for 20 minutes and try doing 15 goblet squats, 15 kettlebell or dumbbell swings and five minutes of running on the treadmill (or around the block) at a moderate pace. Repeat this routine until the 20 minutes are up.
One of Dr. Carter’s favorite high-intensity exercises is a squat to an overhead dumbbell press, which involves holding dumbbells at your shoulders when you descend into the squat, then pressing the dumbbells overhead as you stand
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| Hasui Kawase |
Wrote GREAT
in the sand
a hundred times
forgot about dying
and went home
-Takuboku Ishikawa
I found this on Twitter. I chose the ones that resonated. (maybe this is definition of confirmation bias?)
1. Write down tomorrow's 3:3:3 plan (from Oliver Burkeman)
• 3 hours on your most important project
• 3 shorter tasks
• 3 maintenance activities
Defining a "productive day" is crucial.
The First 3 Spend 3 hours of deep work on your most important project.
3-4 hrs of focused work is our cognitive limit. For best results, complete during your highest state of energy (flow = 500% more effective). Define a specific progress goal. Block out distractions.
The Second 3. Execute 3 shorter tasks. These are urgent to-dos. Often, they're “sticky note” items you may be avoiding (some take only a few mins).
Examples:
• Managing: delegating, providing feedback
• Calls, meetings
• Smaller work tasks
The Third 3. Complete 3 “maintenance activities.” These are items that make your life go smoothly. Schedule time for maintenance (don't cram elsewhere).
Examples:
• Cleaning (laundry, dishes, etc.)
• Self-Improvement: exercising, journaling
2. End the workday with a shutdown ritual
Create a short shutdown ritual (hat-tip to Cal Newport). Close your laptop, plug in the charger, spend 2 minutes tidying your desk. Then say, "shutdown." Separating your life and work is key.
3. Journal 1 beautiful life moment
Delicious tacos, presentation you crushed, a moment of inner peace. Write it down. Gratitude programs a mindset of abundance.
4. Lay out clothes. (*I'd add "lay out tomorrow's coffee, take out items for tomorrow's dinner.... *)
7. Do the dishes
Dirty dishes spill over into other areas of your life + mindset. Bill Gates says dishes are core to his evening routine. It will calm your mind, too.
9. Give your mind an overnight task
Upon closing your eyes, give your mind a job. "How might I make an extra $1k each month?" Don't try to solve it then; just release it to your subconscious (which will work on it overnight).
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| An Art Nouveau door handle from 1905 on the entrance to the City Hall Council Room in Bremen, Germany. Designed by artist Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), one of the founders of the Munich Secession. |
from Recommendo:
NOW WITHOUT ME
by Richard Blanco
Now that my brow is as creased as my palms,
now that I am imagining my home without
me, now that I ponder the someday when I
and my hands will no longer be here needed
to till the soil of my iris beds. Now that I know
they'Il bloom like sapphires without my eyes
to praise them, or to wink back at the wings
of butterflies. Now that the lavender will still
perfume the breeze without my inhale, and
the ivy will scrawl without my pruning. Now
that chipmunks won't need my ears to hear
them chirp as they dart-and-dash, content
as children at play unaware of their mortality.
My father died at fifty-five. I'm fifty, supposing
I might only have five years left to breathe-in
the pine-scented breeze scaling up my hillside,
five years' worth of languid hours on my porch
with my cat, five years to ask why, despite a life
spent believing nothing but this life, now I want
to believe there's some god that only my pulse
explains in sync-not only with this here/now-
but with all I am from: my mother's lavish black
hair and sorrows, my father's immense silence,
my grandmother's scolding that I crafted into
a wisdom still guiding me like the aglow embers
of my grandfather's cigar, the iron-red memory
of his Cuban mountains he never beheld again.
To believe I didn't begin with me, nor will end
with me, never been a me, but a soul beyond
clinging to any home or country--a larger part
of a continuum in the amber light of each dawn
that powders my face and the drifting gestures
of clouds alluding to the first time we assumed
the sun's power with spark of flint on dry brush
to kindle our own flames. That this very poem
from my hands owes itself to the hands that first
mixed soot and tallow with imagination to draw
myth across their cave walls, and to the throats
that first tamed grunts into breaths of language,
gave meaning to the toil of spear and slaughter.
The cosmos may well be a chance clash of rock,
a callous dust, but now that sometimes I forget
names and days of the week, I want to believe
all my endeavors as willed by an eternal desire
held in the wide-open arms of the Milky Way
and in the voice of these lines as consequence,
as witness, ages from now for others to adore
as I have adored: fireflies like constellations,
moonlight shadows like showers, lark songs
like thunder. Lose as I've gladly lost my desire
to name everything or belong to anything but
myself amid my birches bending in the wind.
Imagine as I've imagined: life beyond my bones
that now ache with rain, and relinquish me.
An interview with Blanco about this poem:
[TK]: Now Without Me performs a masterful blend of consonance, balancing harsher pronouncements like a clashing callous chance cosmos with more soothing sounding aspects of life, like moonlight shadows and showers. Do you integrate the sound or feel of the written word with themes you explore?
[RB]: Yes, of course. Just as with a song, the sound of the music should reflect the connotations of the words. Extending Coleridge’s definition of poetry as “the best words in the best order,’ I would say that poetry is also the best sounds in the best order. But this is an instinctual, complex, and often non-linear process. At times the theme informs the sound; at times the sounds develop and strengthen the theme.
