I recently stumbled on a quote/clip from Austin Kleon, one of those grand simplicities that wonderfully pulls more than its apparent weight:

YOU WILL NEED:

• CURIOSITY
• KINDNESS
• STAMINA
• A WILLINGNESS 
TO LOOK STUPID

Rockland Harbor

On passivity:

The average American child by eighteen has seen four thousand hours of commercials, yet very few televisions have been smashed by axes…

    ~Robert Bly (1990)~

“What? You guys sit like this.”

Currently Reading: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram 📚

Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

“What do you mean this is not my spot?”

Fun to think of how much playful, generative space there is in Leah Libresco Sargeant’s phrase “Festivals of Particularity.”

Titles can be so much a part of a poem. I love this from Billy Collins for instance:

Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,
the tortoise has stopped once again
by the roadside,
this time to stick out his neck
and nibble a bit of sweet grass,
unlike the previous time
when he was distracted
by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.

Those little lines are enjoyable enough. The sound, the image, the simplicity, even the subtle praise of slowness implied, all ring of a Mary Oliver poem. In fact, I can just as easily picture Oliver in place of the tortoise.

But what makes the poem, for me, is the not-so-subtle title Collins gives it:

”My Hero”

There’s a wry smile written across the entire poem (which scrambles the original fable in fun ways) that says My heroes are not the ones that usually go by that name.

Getcha Bean boots on

Kitchen Chalk Talk • “…and this something makes demands on us.”