Infinite Care

How pleasantly strange, once again, to find myself running through the neighborhood at four in the morning, while no one else is out and about. And on this new day, what is the first thought I remember? How few thoughts. The others, before and after, have drifted into space. Maybe they’ll find a home out there. Maybe that is their home, except out there is also in here — this body, this mind, this room.

For daily live music, visit our sunflowers, where the nuthatches, chickadees, and scrub jays give superb performances.

A ragged old larkspur, revived by last week’s rain, yields tenderly to a hummingbird.

We don’t say one’s a he and the other’s a she, for both are he and she, as we are all he and she.

It’s the she in me that makes of me a he, and the he in me that makes of me a she.

In one of your old photo albums, there’s a picture of an elderly person being supported by a younger person. Look again, and see if, in that very same image, it’s not also the other way around.

O crane fly in the sink, I’ll be careful not to wet your wings.

Do one thing with infinite care and see where it will take you, see what you might learn.

Thoreau’s journal, February 18, 1854. To Yellow Birch Swamp.

I read some of the speeches in Congress about the Nebraska Bill, — a thing the like of which I have not done for a year. What trifling upon a serious subject! while honest men are sawing wood for them outside. Your congress halls have an ale-house odor, — a place for stale jokes and vulgar wit. It compels me to think of my fellow-creatures as apes and baboons.

Read the sixteenth chapter of Middlemarch.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

September 12, 2023.

[ 1865 ]