To Waiting by W. S. Merwin

I found this work of art at Pinterest.  I don't know who the artist is.  If you do, please let me know.  It's an amazing watercolor painting. Can't you just feel the breeze blowing that gauzy curtain?

To Waiting
by W. S. Merwin

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

from 'Present Company'

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I'm still on a summer reading binge.  Today I'm reading:

"Spring Fever" by Mary Kay Andrews;
"The Night Journal" by Elizabeth Crook;
"The Crooked Inheritance:  Poems" by Marge Piercy, and
"The Name of This Book is Secret" by Pseudomymous Bosch. 

(Why, yes, I do read several books at once...The last one is a children's book I'm reading before giving it to my granddaughter...she's in 3rd grade, and reads at 6th grade level, but I always read the books I send her so we can talk about them together). 

It's been raining almost every afternoon here in the swamps which makes for perfect reading weather and humidity so thick you can cut it with a butter knife.  My yard loves it as do my tomatoes and herbs.  Me, I'm staying close to the air conditioner, book in hand.

Any of you reading anything good?  Let me know if you are.  I'm always on the lookout for new authors/books. 

Happy reading!

xo,
Marion

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." ~Logan Pearsall Smith, Trivia, 1917

Our Town by Iris Dement and Emmylou Harris

This song is for a good friend.  I love Iris Dement and Emmylou more than white bread and long gravy.  Their voices are perfect in this amazing song. (My awesome playlist is gone due to forces beyond my control, but I'm working on a new one.)

They don't make singers like this anymore.  Enjoy.

xoxo,

Marion

Lyrics:

Our Town

By Iris Dement

And you know the sun's settin' fast,

And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.

Up the street beside that red neon light,
That's where I met my baby on one hot summer night.
He was the tender and I ordered a beer,
It's been forty years and I'm still sitting here.

But you know the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.

It's here I had my babies and I had my first kiss.
I've walked down Main Street in the cold morning mist.
Over there is where I bought my first car.
It turned over once but then it never went far.

And I can see the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.

I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa.
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall.
I bring them flowers about every day,
but I just gotta cry when I think what they'd say.

If they could see how the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.

Now I sit on the porch and watch the lightning-bugs fly.
But I can't see too good, I got tears in my eyes.
I'm leaving tomorrow but I don't wanna go.
I love you, my town, you'll always live in my soul.

But I can see the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on, I gotta kiss you goodbye,
But I'll hold to my lover,
'Cause my heart's 'bout to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town.
I can see the sun has gone down on my town, on my town,
Goodnight.
Goodnight.

What To Remember When Waking by David Whyte

What to Remember When Waking
By David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

---David Whyte

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I've been away a while, mired in life:  drawing, painting, scribbling, reading ('Les Miserables' by Victor Hugo, all 1463 pages), crying (that awesome full moon), watching 6 seasons of "Northern Exposure" and the last season of "True Blood".  And watering my plants/flowers/tomatoes.  That about sums up my last month.  It's almost too hot and humid for life, but we walk around the block early every morning, dodging stinging horseflies the size of small birds.  It's a trip. 

I love you all.  Keep on trucking and stay cool.

xoxo,
Marion


"In summer, the song sings itself." ~William Carlos Williams


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"Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability." ~Sam Keen