The New York Morning News correspondant Rosecrans Baldwin chooses his own assignment: walk the length of Manhattan.
He starts out at 5am and in the course of walking the 13.5 miles of the island’s length he seizes upon a moment where even in a huge metropolis, the city can belong to the citizen:
Sometime in the early morning, just before Central Park, I called my wife because I was simply too happy to contain myself. I had to tell her something, but I couldn�t put it into words. Perhaps I had never been so alive. New York can be like that � once in a while the city slows down and becomes ours, we look up, we see ourselves as a part of something very fine and rare, green and black, slowly growing. Not I am, but there it is. That New York exists is a miracle, and for its citizens, the city offers as good a shot at transcendence as any forest or cathedral. The awareness of being part of something more sublime � this crumbling, singing city, and all our lives crumbling and singing too � somehow walking the island�s body before people are on the streets makes the chance to have that feeling much greater. It�s a fleeting moment, only two seconds long, but it�s there.
Thanks to portage for the link
“Years ago in Vietnam, people used to take a small boat out into a lotus pond and put some tea leaves into an open lotus flower. The flower would close in the evening and perfume the tea during the night. In the early morning, when the dew was still on the leaves, you would return with your friends to collect the tea. On your boat was everything you needed: fresh water, a stove to heat it, teacups and a teapot. Then, in the beautiful light of the morning, you prepared tea right there, enjoying the whole morning drinking tea on the lotus pond.”
— Thich Nhat Hahn, Creating True Peace, p. 67-68
There is something very important about having a practice like this that both expands time and connects one to the land. I do something like this around here on Bowen Island, off the west coast of Canada, where my kids and I head out to the beach or into the forest to walk and eat from the land: seaweed or berries or fern roots.
But what can compare with drinking tea perfumed by a lotus flower?
I can’t believe how little play the story of the Georgian velvet revolution is getting in the mainstream media. Certainly in Canada the major news outlets are paying it some heed, but this should be a huge global story. Over at netvironments, Laura has been tracking a few of the critical developments, as the people of a country calmly and effectively take their government back.
This comes to me as I have just cracked Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World, and so it becomes the next chapter.
Hard on the heels of Thich Naht Hahn’s advice on mindful consumption comes this poem which appeared today at Poetry Daily:
On First Looking into Heaney’s Beowulf
Anne MacKay
Anne MacKay
A bunch of high class thugs
returns in a golden cloud of
exhaust fumes and dust, helmets
polished bright as maseratis,
spears and chain mail clashing,
enters to a riot of cheers.
The king’s daughter and
groupies serve wine,
dripping meat and beer
while they boast and yell,
unable to shut up, telling
how the blood spurted
like a chain-saw massacre,
how sword thrusts blasted
guts all over the heath.
Then the big guy shouts how,
at great cost, he hacked the
slavering homo-monster and its
disgusting mother to pieces,
brought back the slimy head and
taloned arm. Roars of laughter.
Meanwhile, the bard, who’s
no dope and knows on which
side his meat is seasoned,
commits to memory every heroic,
bloody word; great deeds to
inspire a millennium of brutal
bullet-pocked worlds to come.