the beauty that is everywhere

love notes to the world at large.

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Believe me

Some friends of mine started a writing group around the beginning of the last decade, and this is how I first met them. I am so deeply grateful that I did, as they are the loveliest people and writers: Leah, and Nathan, and Melanie. And RaasaLeela, who was in ...

Little Portals

Sometimes I want to give you everything. Yes, you, reading this now. I sit in the morning darkened by the rain, listening to the tea pot work up to a whistle, making precise Morse code clicks on my iPad keyboard as I type this. I have just read this morning's ...

Sunset

Sunset Boulevard to the water, then up the coast to Santa Barbara as the sun moves spectacularly from our sight. Image by Corie Crowley, Coriedoesmyhair.com.

Ordinary Life

A quote from Jan Frazier, "When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening" --What do I want for myself? I want to learn how to pare from my consciousness all that is not gratitude. I want to cease praying for anything I do not already have, but pray ...

Into the mystic

Ah, it's played at last. No road trip would be complete without it.

We are a mile high

Over a mile, actually. Altitude 6,000 ft. Heading into Flagstaff.

Love Beams Back

Somehow, I would pour the colors of this room where I sit, of the birds that sing outside my window, of the knockout pink roses which have begun to multiply in bloom, into this liquid page where I write. This page which goes to you, which beams all I would ...

Kenny in that Grand Canyon [video]

Here is a video of Kenny Crowley, beauty-walker, singer-songwriter, son of mine, singing his anthem to the Grand Canyon and to all of earth. Last summer he retrofitted his pickup truck so it would be a camper/home on wheels and did a big loop during July and August. He left ...

Illinois

This was a very different sunrise over corn. First it started flashing me its color behind the St. Louis arch. Then over the Missouri River and into Illinois where the colors of the sun spreading across the enormous sky and the fields and the road were all I wanted in the ...

What happens if the power goes out?

Just pose the question to yourself, whether or not there's an impending weather event. What happens? Have you got excellent flashlights, fondue pots, Viewmaster sets and drawers full of good candles? Gallons of clean water, Sterno, batteries? It’s a comforting thing to have provisions. But still more comforting to know ...

Dance is a very powerful drug

"Dance is a very powerful drug, Mr. Keane. If embraced judiciously, it can exorcise demons, access deep seated emotions and color your life in joyous shades of brilliant magenta that you never knew existed. But, one must shoulder its challenges with intrepid countenance if one is ever to reap its ...

Tap here

Tap here to begin writing, someone whispered, and she realized it had already begun. It had started somewhere after her telephone call with a friend from her early life, from when she was some inconsequential, flimsy thing unrecognizable to her now and it had fluttered, birdlike, when she began her ...

Yesterday On the River

My darling son Kenny was in town this weekend and we went to the James River, by way of what's known in these parts as Texas Beach. You depart ordinary reality slowly, via a path from a park near Maymont which seems initially rather, well, ordinary. This is, ...

Goodwater

Kenny told me once when he was little that he'd been drinking godwater from flowers. Goodwater/Godwater. Same/same.

Treat. Yo. Self.

You know I have a Parks & Rec obsession, right? (It's my Pleasantville.) Anyway, here is one of the many, many reasons why:

Everything

In that Leonard Cohen film I posted last time, LC talks of being interested in going through his days in a state of grace. And if he is not in a state of grace, he goes back to bed. That he says this in response to a question from a ...

Radio silence (Sedona/beauty/road trip)

Here is a post from a few days ago I thought I had published... "Heading toward Sedona now. Just saw an elk jerky roadside stand. The sign said "really good." I believe them...." You will note the radio silence since just before entering Sedona. Meet me there, all my beloveds reading ...

Wyoming, further

The land flattens out, stretches further. Yarrow grows at the roadside. Treeless, here where you'd have to go so deep for water. Scattered cattle ranches, the continental divide. Ethereal, butter-colored place.

The sinking of a ship

I love when I wake up in the morning with finger waves in my hair, as though I've been to a night salon, where my straight hair has been pampered and has run wild into curls. I love when my Titanic of a story has hit its iceburg. And it has. ...

Diners Are Portals

Laundromats are portals, too. You know what I mean. You walk in, the color is different. The people have appeared there for each other, converged on the place to do ordinary things with great beauty, like drink coffee softly from a heavy mug or lift the lid to the Speed ...

Collect stories

When someone speaks to you, let everything slow down, and listen very closely. This is how you will get a glimpse of someone's true spirit, and maybe share a little of yours with them. You can practice this at first with people you already really like, and then as you ...

Road

I am on a road trip to the mountains, feeling completely dogless. Where the hell is Eli Crowley. The car is packed with gear and coolers, heading west. He is supposed to be in the back, wind fluttering his feathers, meeting my eyes in the rear view, lighting up every ...

Stories

I have things to tell you, you know. It won't take long. Or it may take a hundred years. And I will be listening, because you have things to say, too. We have stories to put together like bubbles, bumping lazily into each other, fusing, popping, suddenly boundaryless, suddenly all ...

Stranger than Fiction

Do you ever feel as though your life is being narrated? Or as though you may want to turn to Dustin Hoffman for metaphysical advice? Then this little gem of a movie is one of your new best friends. The luminous beings that appear in this movie are: Will Farrell, ...

Camper Dream

In the dream last night, the tri-level where I once lived was collapsing, much like -- you know -- the memories give way in the film "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." At the ceiling on the ground level, you could see the floor above beginning to disintegrate, and ...

The Kool-Aid Wino, and other stories

These short stories are continually luminous to me, and when I read them -- or when I breathed them in and out later, after they'd become a part of me -- I was so pleased to be in a world where they had appeared. They warm up the place considerably. The ...

Choices

I am at Silver Diner for the first time, having a delightful Saturday morning. I've helped my Dad shovel two truckloads of mulch and, after my Belgian waffles, Amish eggs and nitrate-free bacon, I am going over to lounge around with my beautiful sister and talk of anything/everything. A lovely young ...

Purple

Oh my goodness I am so in love with the lady in the truckstop where I just went in for ice and beef jerky. She has purple eyeshadow and pink lipstick and dark moviestar hair, staring off into the desert when I opened the glass door. This is going in the ...

Everyday Adventures in Beingness: Some Ideas

Here are some things that might be fun. Or might not. You decide. Research memory. Or Joseph Campbell. Or the workings of the brain. Or the Shakers, or Diane Arbus, or Walker Evans. Wallpaper the bathroom with Bazooka bubblegum comics. Plan a weird ass party. Make yourself some paper mache birds and let them ...

Heck yeah, Caitlin

I see I have some catching up to do. I'm only halfway through Caitlin Moran's "How to Be a Woman," which is HILarious and brilliant, and LITERALLY made me want to stand up on the chair at Elwood Thompson's one fine morning and shout out "I AM A FEMINIST!" just ...

Angels in plain sight

Imagine that everywhere you go, there are angels in plain sight. Your waiter, for example. Here is what happened to me one day several years back when I sat in one of my favorite coffee shops, writing, brainstorming, considering what my next move in life would be. I looked up from ...

Being Grateful

I've started to notice that there is something about being grateful that seems to change my way of being in the world. And it seems to me to be another aspect of this notion of having a choice. I can find something or someone to be grateful for. Even if it's ...

Oxygen

"Breathe," someone said to me yesterday. Good idea. #survivaltactic. How is it I had forgotten about breathing? Taking in oxygen. Even when I have worked fourteen straight days and am doing little beyond working very hard, eating and sleeping. Or especially then. I can still breathe in and out. I can still ...

The Road

There is something about a road trip, with its vast changing panoramas of field, sky, city, flowers, truck wheels, with its swooping birds and deep possibilities, that lets me hold life a little looser, more delicately, giving it room to breathe.

On Grocery Stores

To me, the true test of an excellent grocery store is this: if you walked in smiling (and I hope you were), were you smiling when you came out? If you’re all frustrated when you come out then conjure up a lovely grocery store to go to. It will very likely ...

Les émotifs anonymes

Yes, okay. Oui, ca va. Je comprend.

Lately

For many years, whenever I've sat down and asked myself something along the lines of: "What does your divine right life look like?", something in me would flash back a vision of gorgeous walls of jars. Jars filled with beautiful food and lots and lots of dried herbs. Lovely colors. ...

Loving Kindness

Send love into your body -- your heart, your cheekbones, your belly. Know that you are love in human form. Beam out love to everyone you have ever met. This kind of love you will beam needs nothing back; it needs nothing more than to make its way from your heart ...

Take Polaroids of Your TV Screen

Take Polaroids of your tv screen while Lucas dances, black eyes, black hair, black turtleneck, lanky Lucas, while he dances, no tripod, no vertical hold, no pause, just you leaning sweet into Lucas. Make 1,000 copies on photo glossy, staple gun each glossy to a telephone pole every mile from ...

Let the Mystery Be - Iris Dement (VIDEO)

I could listen to this forever. "Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from. Everybody's worrying where they're going to go when the whole thing's done. No one knows for certain, so if it's all the same to me, I think I'll just let the mystery be."

What if?

What if no job or house or car or ideal weight or ideal husband is what is going to make you shine? What if there’s a bucket of magic in your secret heart and everything you witness stands transfixed, watching you, awaiting that moment when you smile and start flinging that sparkle everywhere. What if everything simply ...

Magic Wands are Regular

I love moving my car to a new spot every two hours. Because it means a small adventure, regularly scheduled. What will it be? Today it is a trip to the yoga studio to check it out and pick up a schedule, a little pink card I can hold in ...

World Exploded Into Love All Around Me

And now, I sit, with my hand on my heart, full of love for Bob Dylan, that wondrous, mighty seer who has decided the time has come for the story of the Titanic TO BE SUNG. Christomighty, and amen, brother. You are, for sure, the fiddler I want fiddling whilst ...

Climbing the Tor

It is early, early in the morning. It doesn't feel like it's late at night. I woke at 2 a.m. and I love that sometimes. The stillness. The poetry of middle of the night thoughts. Would I love it as much if every night some wakefulness awakened me, and my ...

Airstreams are beautiful

They just seem to match out here, something glimmering back the color of everything as it drives through, just a little more saturated, just a little more certain of its light.

Where is it, this true home of yours?

Your true home is where you live in your heart. The place where you are connected to love and the way it moves through the world, permeating everything, beaming out from toll booth ladies, impatient clerks, flat tires, cows mooing, people who interrupt you, redwood trees, sun setting on the ...

It was always about the dance

You know that, don't you, Scott Hastings? Maybe the Ballroom Dancing Federation doesn't have any new moves. And you're bored with the old ones. Aren't you, Scott? Wouldn't you rather dance your own dance now? Wherever your feet want to go?

Station Wagons

Just came across this gorgeous post called "Station Wagon Living" on English Muse. Makes me real happy. Here's a photo of my little sister sitting in front of one of the many station wagons of our childhoods. We would, like every American family, load them up in the summer with coolers ...

The Mother of Language

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful ...

Bubbles

In the writing group last night, we wrote. I kept turning on the porch light, walking out to meet the things that would be written, but I just saw them glimmering off in the backstreets, holding still when I paused to listen. They are on their way to dance parties, to ...

Everything

This morning I sit with coffee and a bowl of fading zinnias, still so filled with their color, still tiny gorgeous miracles. I am feeling a tiny bit rushed because I woke up late and in about a minute I am going to be making a beeline for work in time for a meeting.

But I thought I would be in gratitude anyway. Even if I am rushing, and possibly some cortisol is starting to make its way into my bloodstream. Or is even that just a thought?

I am going to make every move in gratitude today. And a tiny voice in me says, “what else is there, really?”

I suppose that is another way of saying that everything is everything.

Xoxo

Mural Craft
The town comes through here. My wife combs their hair, adjusts their chins with her…
LaPorte
LaPorte, Indiana Trailer (by Jason Bittner & Joe Beshenkovsky) from Princeton Architectural…
for Kenny
…
for Corie
Iron and Wine perform 'Lion's Mane' on Sound Opinions from WBEZ on…
Everything
In that Leonard Cohen film I posted last time, LC talks of being interested in going through his…
Bubbles
In the writing group last night, we wrote. I kept turning on the porch light, walking out to…
my/mother/earth
My mother just showed me a page from a newspaper she'd saved from 1979 and tucked into her knitting…
River
you are the…
Tap here
Tap here to begin writing, someone whispered, and she realized it had already begun. It had started…
Momma Love Tea
Oh, my darlings, it has been most of the winter since I've written here. Kenny called me on his way…

LaPorte
LaPorte, Indiana Trailer (by Jason Bittner & Joe Beshenkovsky) from Princeton Architectural…
Heck yeah, Caitlin
I see I have some catching up to do. I'm only halfway through Caitlin Moran's "How to Be a…
PS
P.S. I have just a little more to say to you this morning, and it is this. J'adore Charles Simic.…
In the lovely month of September
Two much-awaited-by-moi masterpieces have come in to the world this September: Bob Dylan's…
Lately
For many years, whenever I've sat down and asked myself something along the lines of: "What does…
The Kool-Aid Wino, and other stories
These short stories are continually luminous to me, and when I read them -- or when I breathed them…
When I Am
Well said, Mary Oliver. Well said. When I Am Among the Trees, by Mary…
The Foxfire Books: How to Make Moonshine, Rain and Fiddles
My friend Katie, who grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, mentioned the "hippy Foxfire…
The Happiness Project
And while we are on the subject of happiness this week, let's give a shout out to The Happiness…
Link Love: Michael Pollan's Food Rules Animated (VIDEO)
Posted by BrainPickings.com, "Michael Pollan's Food Rules Animated in Stop-Motion" Just lovely. …

Mother Mountain
…
This guy
Pure genius and love in action. …
Momma Love Tea
Oh, my darlings, it has been most of the winter since I've written here. Kenny called me on his way…
Up to the Mountain
Patty Griffin's singing me up to the mountain as I head to Asheville for the holy days. Ahhhh,…
Plants to keep near
Well, this is pretty cool. Plants that clean up the air for you by eliminating formaldehyde and…
Rainwater
How brilliant is this? The elegant solution: store rainwater in your soil, where it's needed. …
Living the dream, baby
Lovely Northern Exposure. …
Yesterday On the River
My darling son Kenny was in town this weekend and we went to the James River, by way of what's…
My Planet: Healing with Whales and Other Stories
My dear and lovely friend Leah Lamb has launched My-Planet.org, and with it brings to life her…
Animal, you, animal, me
These images by Gregory Colbert in his exhibit, Ashes and Snow, make me feel completely weepy. Just…