dual personalities

Hope you are having a diamond of a day, able to enjoy the weather and read a little poetry.

The Real Prayers are not the Words, but the Attention that Comes First

The little hawk leaned sideways and, tilted, rode
the wind. Its eye at this distance looked like green
glass; its feet were the color of butter. Speed, obviously,
was joy. But then, so was the sudden, slow circle
it carved into the slightly silvery air, and the squaring
of its shoulders, and the pulling into itself the long,
sharp-edged wings, and the fall into the grass where it
tussled a moment, like a bundle of brown leaves, and
then, again, lifted itself into the air, that butter-color
clenched in order to hold a small, still body, and it flew
off as my mind sang out oh all that loose, blue rink
of sky, where does it go to, and why?        

–Mary Oliver

Today is the birthday of writer Eudora Welty (1909–2001) whom I have admired for many years. It is always a good day to take down one of her books from a shelf and open and read.

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily – perhaps not possibly – chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”

Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

I will also note that tomorrow is daughter #2’s birthday.

We will celebrate her birthday in 10 days when she and baby Katie visit for a long weekend. Of course, we can’t wait to hold that baby, but I can’t wait to hold my baby…

…who was a precious bundle of joy not so long ago and is now a beautiful and talented young woman.

Sunrise, sunset. Time is the continuous thread of revelation.

The watercolor is by Louis Michel Eilshemius, painted between 1888 and 1910. (Detroit Institute of Arts)

*Tom Petty, Walls