A poet never takes notes

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Starlings in Winter

by Mary Oliver


Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

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Happy November, so suddenly. I feel like I barely greeted October, but it'll be back next year. New moon tomorrow and new goals for this month. I have been neglecting my moleskine, for one. Unacceptable! Need to get back into the writing groove. I think that'll be my November resolution.

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I had a dream of snow and it was glorious! I cannot wait for the smell of snow to freeze my nostrils and for that smooth, glittering blanket of white to cover the city. Even more than that, I cannot wait to be in Vermont in December. I can crunch my way into the woods, lie on my back, and be oddly warm as I rest in my snow bed and look up through the branches. To me there is nothing more peaceful than being alone in the woods in the winter. The quiet envelopes you and I am always so humbled by the power of winter.

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A dear friend sent this to me quite some time ago and it popped up on my itunes today. I think I like it.

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You learn something new every day. From an interview with Lise Eliot, author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain:

In 1982, a high-profile study that made Science suggested that the corpus callosum, which is the white matter that connects our two brain hemispheres, is larger in women than it is in men. That finding was supposed to explain why women are better multitaskers and why they are more empathetic. A slew of follow-up studies followed. By the end of the 1990s, a couple of scientists did a meta-analysis. That’s where you do a comprehensive search of the scientific literature to find every study that’s been done, and analyze for effect size. This way, you have a huge population, and you can create an enormous study. In 1997, a meta-analysis of the studies on the corpus collosum found no difference in size between men and women. That’s been edited out of the neuropsych text books.

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What beautiful leather bike seats.....one day, one day:


http://www.karaginther.com/

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My gigantic pile of laundry is calling my name, so I had better tend to it.

Then I'm going to book-slut it up. Aka: devour a book while my laundry gets sudsy and clean

xo