In short, the more attuned to others you become, the healthier you become, and vice versa. This mutual influence also explains how a lack of positive social contact diminishes people. Your heart’s capacity for friendship also obeys the biological law of “use it or lose it.” If you don’t regularly exercise your ability to connect face to face, you’ll eventually find yourself lacking some of the basic biological capacity to do so.
finally freed
If you don’t know what to do with the snow
paint it on paper, while hearing every breath so
close couldn’t they just roll over and take to brushes?
If honesty is a virtue you are limited by an ability
to secure emotion on canvas, the greens are
progress and the gray swirls a stifled passion.
Is it the snow, or a lack of honesty, or a breadth of
confidence that keeps the spring stuck between
afternoons when hunger slowly begins to pale,
when you pull out the palette and sketch
landscapes for what a perfect life may
look like if fine art weren’t fiction.
The sun is beginning to set and you’ve run out of planet.
Squeeze a lime softly in your palm and listen carefully to the
juice roll down your wrist. At this moment when you are so
closely in tune with the smallest of bright liquid,
you speak of citrus —
At last vulnerable to feeling,
you are finally freed.
—Brené Brown, Daring Greatly
(Saturday NYTimes reading post long runs are simply the best. )
“What are you running after? I asked Jornet. Having beaten men, do you now want to challenge the mountains? He gently corrected me. You don’t beat the mountains. You go when they permit, he said. The speed records and “firsts” aren’t important except for motivation, he insisted. Then he mentioned the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Hughes Galeano, who once likened the ideal of Utopia to the horizon — goals that retreat even as we chase them. “The important thing is not to catch something,” said Jornet, whose own memoir, “Run or Die,” will be published in the United States in July. What matters in life is the pursuit, and everything we learn along the way. “The important thing,” he said, “is moving.”
“The trick is getting just far enough away: sufficient distance to let you truly shed workaday worries, but not so far as to make you feel lost.”
The Skeptic’s Guide to the South Pacific
photo: Gerrit van Ommering/Buiten-Beel/Redux
—Re-reading Born to Run to help remember why I run.
Perhaps the very “otherness” of what I experience in California makes the place so rivetingly alive for me. The sheer inscrutable mysteriousness of the place from the banal — why are people so friendly at the grocery store? — to the unusual — the deeply unsettling experience of watching a distant hillside burst into flames — makes me aware of the high and low poetry of this place.
photo:Esther Pearl Watson
the morning commute
he won’t speak the same words
when histories stuck in present tense
ring through ear buds cushioning steel
and faces on the morning commute
a woman with a ring cradles the black
and white marble notebook, trying to find
x, the equations hard to play with in pen.
Essex, Delancey, the two-a-day stops
with everyone looking to solve the problems;
erasing numbers and calculating the sum
of each life’s square root.
The credit lies in the search
for the whole number circled
at the bottom of the page
fitting perfectly into the fifth track
on the iPod the song finishes
just as he disembarks on 23rd street
with all of the answers that say
yes, we are giving everything
there is to let go of.
Poetry on poetry by writer and artist Natt Różańska, reminiscent of Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout project.
bring it on, spring.
also, savannah, you’re pretty.
