Possibilities

They take root on a morning walk,

at a desk in a small corner of a house

or at 10,000 feet,

a cloud carpet just outside the window.

On a Tuesday night, a Thursday afternoon

and those first few minutes of a new year.

Is that what draws us to it, this annual rite?

Again and again, year after year,

the new day,

the empty-ish slate,

the who-knows-what-might-be-possible.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/opinion/the-new-year-within.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja61fxmY77Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player

A New Year

Resolutions

Some years I've written a whole notebook page full of New Year's resolutions.
Lately, I'm thinking that's a little much.

Last year I didn't bother to write even one resolution, didn't get swept into New Year's Eve but that didn't seem quite right. I like a hubbub and a reason to say 'hip, hip' and a kind of loud 'hooray.' I like the promise of the next 365 days, all those chances.

So this year I have one resolution.
Worry less.

I like the sound of that kind of 2014. When the worries stop by, I'll gently push them off and
let them flutter somewhere else, away.

Cartwheeling on a breeze

There were hundreds of them, starlings perhaps or sparrows, cavorting and cartwheeling on the winter wind. Up and over the trees they swooped, chattering and singing.

 For a moment, I thought I heard them laughing.

Alight too

Along Main Street

Someone once said the two best words in the English language are 'summer day.'

I would have to agree but would also cast a vote for 'road trip,' for all the wonders and oddities you stumble upon along the way.

In Central Park

In Central Park yesterday, I could have just walked bench to bench, reading each of the small plates fastened to the backs of the benches, in memory of a loved one, in celebration of another, others honoring and recalling the hours and days spent seated there, watching people and life spill past. 

Instead, we walked all over the park and took in the stark beauty of the leaf-less trees, the revelers, the dog walkers, the sax player, the plastic bucket drummers, the city just outside its borders. Still I couldn't resist "reading a bench or two." And spotted this one, a toast to Ginger and Arthur and "70 miraculous years" of marriage. 

I thought of who they might have been when they first made that promise; how young they likely were to be making such a vow: I will be with you through all of it, everything that life gives. 

I imagined the laughter, the shared aches, the whispers, the dreams and conversations across a kitchen table and 70 years! 

And right next to it was this plaque:

As I walked past I wished them that same happy miracle.

12/14

On December 14 

http://wnpr.org/post/simple-solemn-tribute-sandy-hook-victims?utm_referrer=http%3A//m.wnpr.org/%3Futm_referrer%3D%23mobile/13664

Looking down

Sidewalk art: 

Remnants of the morning frost left an imprint as pretty as any fabric design.   

That jolly old elf

Clack

There they were in the Amherst shop window, a gathering of typewriters, like old friends. I tried to lean in close to hear the clack of the keys but it was somewhere far off, not here.    

Horse Barn Hill - again

Some places just call to us and this is one, Horse Barn Hill in Storrs. 

I never tire of the view or how, as I walk by the barns and the meadow, 

little pieces of the past flutter back and drift along with me.       

The tiny fella inched his way across the parking lot, so close in color to the asphalt, I almost missed him. His eyes, wide, were fixed on something in the distance I couldn't see.

With each year, the colors of fall catch and humble me more; beauty is everywhere fringing convenience store parking lots and wide open fields.

One Morning

Some mornings when I wander down to the beach, the beauty is staggering. Today the sky's deep morning blues were stitched with coal grey clouds. The blues turned to lavender and stretches of pink, all of it a preamble to the sun which began to rise over the quiet waters.

The usual suspects were all there: the two gulls perched together on one rock. The egrets that dipped their beaks into the low waters and craggy rocks in search of breakfast, each movement elegant. The five ducks that paddled everywhere together.

The sky changed again and the morning woke.

Grit

The last time Diana Nyad tried to swim from Cuba to Florida I thought `Enough!' Everything about it was far too punishing, too risky and seemingly impossible.

And then yesterday, the news came that she finished the swim at 64. On her fifth try, she did it.

One hundred and ten miles from Havana to the Keys through cross currents and waters that dropped at night to dangerously low temperatures. She had to out-fox tides and sharks, exhaustion and a particularly nasty box jellyfish.

It took years and ingenuity, relentless drive, an abidingly loyal team and a grit I admire more than anything else. Each time she shook her head NO at those of us who thought, `Impossible' and put on her suit and got back in.

Perhaps that's one thing I love best about living, how other people's quests carry us and remind us, we have to get back in too. We have to head toward whatever it is we are after.

Why? I wondered back when she first tried it and, particularly, the time before this one. But I get it now.

Why put a rover on Mars? Why run a marathon or stare down a blank page or put that first brush to canvas? Why plant rows and rows of seeds or buy that old car for the chance of having a run at rehabbing that old engine?

Because the long  night in the cold tossed seas is now in the distance and the outline of the shore is just ahead, right there.

                                                 ~                                          ~

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/sports/nyad-completes-cuba-to-florida-swim.html?hp&_r=0

http://www.diananyad.com/

The poet Seamus Heaney died this week. NPR ran an old interview and Heaney spoke about the home he grew up in as a child. He described how the railroad tracks ran by his house and the telegraph wires too. He and his friends used to watch as the raindrops gathered on the wires and in the magical way of childhood they imagined other possibilities. 

In the poem "The Railway Children," Heaney wrote, "We thought words traveled the wires/in the shiny pouches of raindrops/Each one seeded full with the light/Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves/So infinitesimally scaled/We could stream through the eye of a needle."

On a morning walk today, I stopped to watch the raindrops gather on the wild beach roses, the skinny green stalks and pale leaves. And as a misty rain continued to fall on this Labor Day picnic day, I had to smile. 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98772112

All week I have been thinking about Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech, on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, the majesty and magnitude of it, the cadences, the poetry and the power.

I thought a lot about words. The way they lift us, how they can 

carry us to new and better places. I passed the Statue of Liberty early this morning and those words tumbled back to me.

"'My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountain side, let freedom ring.' And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true."

http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-77162201/

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15615

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XBa55sDTIiA&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DXBa55sDTIiA

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175887

New York, New York

There was a gauzy film over the city, as if it hadn't quite woken.

A fence post on the walk around Walden Pond. 

A quiet sun-drenched corner of the Concord Library with long oak tables and sculptures and busts of Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott, a lovely place to lose an hour.