Ice cream = well-being

As part of my print-to-read effort, I may have geeked out a little over this “print as pamphlet” option that I’ve only just now discovered. 🖨️📄🤓

“His architecture clearly expresses his beliefs through the modular structure and the simplicity of its form. Yet, it does not dictate activities, rather it enables people to shape their own lives within his buildings with elegance, normality, poetry and joy.”

Serene on Mount Chocorua (2019)

Beautiful foliage in Maine today. The signs of spring are here!

A note on repetition in the film Paterson — and something of an elaboration on this post.

Iain McGilchrist:

The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it. But that is a logical error: to exert power over something requires us only to know what happens when we pull the levers, press the button, or utter the spell.

“Another sunny day?!”

“Can you believe it?! The sun is out!”

Finished reading: Upstream by Mary Oliver 📚

“I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.”

I am sure I’ve said this before, but I have never once picked up Mary Oliver for even the quickest of reads and not felt that I’d been given some profound gift — articulated in and through a holy lightness, and often with quiet and wry humor. Nothing in nature is too small or too wild or too brute to be disclosed to her or by her in this way.

As Oliver puts it, toward the end of her essay “Swoon,” all of which has been spent observing the activities of a spider, there comes a moment when

the news culminates and, slowly or bluntly, the moral appears. It is music to be played with the lightest of fingers. All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!
But a spider? Even that?
Even that.