Tag: noteable quotable

“Breathe into the places in your body that hold tension.  Use your breath – and release.

Where can you find space?  Between your shoulder blades?  Behind your hips?

 …between thoughts?   …words…?”

“One day your finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.”

–Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. I

septwoods16
Loch Raven, afternoon

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.  There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

 

“We just got a notion… we took three years, and we rowed from Dublin from Wexford, to Wales, to Britany… we did the Bay of Biscay… went as far as Corona… and then went by sea to Santiago-Componstela (Spain).”  –Breanndon

“And, what was it like, now… rowing in the high seas… a man-made boat?”  –Interviewer Maire Moriarty

“…she kind of stuck to the skin of the water… and she was one with the sea…  It was, just pure magic…  Being in the boat, which was built by two members of the crew, designed a couple thousand years ago…   You come ashore in a yacht, and just, nobody notices you; but you come ashore in a (Currach) and it has a humanity about it… just, people just stopped and just looked at it as if we were carrying… a whale, or something… it kind of speaks to you…  It had personality, that we didn’t design…   You’re out there, humbly, just dealing with the sea, and nothing between you and the sea except a small bit of canvas, painted with tar…   You come ashore at night, and you hear the sea every night, and you hear it in the morning; you go to bed with the sound of the waves and the sound of the birds, and you’re waking in it the following morning…   It’s taken me this long, six or seven weeks, to come really ashore.”  –Breanndon

–Breanndon O’Beaglaoich (“Brandon O’Beagley”) of Brandon Creek, on rowing in a currach, from Ireland all the way down the Camino