Five Pieces You Will Love On This Autumn Thursday (Oct. 19)

A father's hands. Worthy of love? Lighted windows. Art "at a remove". Trees and humans: a metaphor.

Ben

Oct 19, 2023

Friends,

As we near the end of the week, Thursday provides some can’t-miss pieces. I hope you enjoy them.

As always, please support these writers by reading their work and spreading the word.

Thank you,

Ben

Let me sound the trumpet for

Memoir Land

. Blaise Allysen Kearsley can flat-out write.

In The Story Of My Father’s Hands, Kearsley shares her unique, yearning relationship with her father through feelings buried deep inside as she watches him keenly. An event occurs that makes her wonder whether others see her father as she knows him to be. In the meantime, only she can see “the cool art teacher with the bushy, salt-and-pepper beard, ironed-creased bell-bottom Levi’s, slate-gray Wallabees that I loved.”

From here, I’ll hand it over to Kearsley.

Please do not miss this moving homage to her father.

Satya Robyn

tackles an age-old question through her love affair with rabbits, including Poppet, which spanned years. In What Makes Us Worthy Of Love?, she writes:

In a nutshell, this is my experience: We do not have to do anything to be worthy of love. Why did I love Poppet? I didn’t love her because she praised me, or achieved anything special, or offered me anything practical or emotional. I loved her because I took the time to get to know her, and I appreciated the essence of who she was – alien as it was to me in some ways. I loved her just because she was her rabbity self. This is my experience of loving other humans too. (emphasis in original)

Walking this path smoothly is no easy feat, however, as it’s burdened by the often painful formative experiences of our “young parts” that “skew the way [we] see the world.”

I especially like this alternative:

When humans fail us there is always the love that lives inside us, the animal kingdom, landscape, the sun and the sky. Behind all of that, in my experience, is the unlimited, unconditional and totally ungraspable love of the divine.

This is by no means a self-help piece, but Robin offers some pointers to consider as we ponder this very large question.

And don’t forget to watch the short (0:06) video of Poppet, Smokey, and Joe in action.

Tommy Dixon

shares an imaginative personal thought piece. In My Love for Lighted Windows, he writes:

One of my favorite things to do while walking in the evening is fantasizing about what’s behind a lighted window. There’s something enchanted about them. A certain luminous whisper. . . . Behind a lighted window, anything could be happening.

Dixon displays the same creativity as in the quote above, as well as the realization that his fantasies most likely are not playing out as he imagines them, and that ultimately, he has to return home.

PHOTO OF THE DAY

The legendary John Coltrane, age 40, April 1966.

Source: Chuck Stewart, Smithsonian Institute.

I spent countless hours with Coltrane’s album Lush Life (1957) as I studied.

What happens when temporal ignorance meets timelessness?

Robert Walrod

explains in With My Own Eyes:

Some years ago, I visited Munich’s Lenbachhaus, home to an incredible collection of Blaue Reiter paintings. A group of German teenagers continually interrupted my encounters with the Kandinskys and Franz Marcs . . . [and] spent no more than ten seconds on each painting, with the majority of that time devoted to framing the picture on the cell phone screen. . . . [T]hey spent almost no time on the act of looking itself.

I saw this in 1983 among adult Japanese tourists running at full speed with video cameras at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico. Substack’s own M.E. Rothwell recently described seeing increasing incidents of this behavior during his travels through the great museums of Europe. Why does this happen? I suppose time is fleet; actual experiences mean too little in today’s world; but photos last forever.

Walrod calls this viewing artwork “at a remove” through technology. He shatters futile explanations.

Also, why do art galleries provide such “an important counterbalance” to the antiseptic, disconnected digital world of immediacy on-demand and books being read as PDFs – the “cultural air we breathe,” as Walrod puts it?

Walrod’s insights are brilliant. I loved this piece.

In The Tree Party, Alexander M. Crow at

The Crow's Nest

provides a fascinating look at the world of trees and posits metaphorically how trees’ unique traits influence their interactions with others, just as human traits do. Crow writes:

The woodlands you encounter will almost never be composed of just one species of tree, as a company work environment, party or otherwise, will very rarely be composed of one type of worker. Instead, both are varied. As different workers often exhibit different characteristics, the strengths that drew them to that job, for example, so too do the Standing People show a vast range of abilities and uses.

He defines the idea of Standing People in an earlier post:

Ever since I first heard the Native American term, I have thought of trees as the Standing People. It fits, in a way which feels right, in a way which is respectful and also practical. Trees are all different, each species with properties which make them unique, in the same way as we human people, each with characteristics and a personality of their own.

The Tree Party is a great read that showcases the author’s unique thought process. I really enjoyed it.