“In my biology class, we’d talked about the definitions of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow…. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, if fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than they are–brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn’t settle; fire doesn’t tolerate; fire doesn’t ‘get by.’
Fire does.
Fire is.”
–Dan Wells
live
Morning Trip (134)
“What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?”
–Mary Oliver, Listening to the World, Interview On Being with Krista Tippett
Notations from The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham
What I thought, when I’d only reached page four of the text, might leave me for a shitty distasteful feeling that I would wish to scrub from my mind and body as one would a rape–should I continue to read. I took a great amount of time, even in my sleep, considering the context of this book, that had a copy date of 1926. I decided to be amazed to wonder over how the writer thought and how much I will never know if he wrote with the view and influence of humans present in his social grouping at the time. I wonder, even, if he might have been considered a rogue, bluntly writing as he willed his hand to do.
“…They learn little on their wanderings beyond how to cadge, how to steal, how to avoid dogs and the police. They are not pilgrims but outlaws, and many would be highway robbers had they the vitality and the pluck necessary to hold up wayfarers. Most of them are but poor walkers, so that the word tramp is often misapplied to them….”
Later, on page 29, he writes, “…Class is the most disgusting institution of civilization, because it puts barriers between man and man….”
The remaining notes, from my best recollection, are simply things that struck me.
“So when we look on a river we are affected by its hidden relationship to our own life. The river interprets our mood. The road suggests God as a taskmaster who would have us work; the river suggests Him as a poet who would have us live in poetry. The Creator must be a poet–not a General or a Judge or a Master Builder; there is so much of pure poetry in His creation….”
“What is a tramping day if it does not liberate a voice, so that you can sing out your soul to the free sky.”
“The heart can be lifted up by poetry even more than by song. And the inner meaning and the sense of a poem becomes one’s own on the march when it lends it rhythms and verbal emotions to express the hidden yearnings of one’s own being.”
“The life opens us with its very breadth. Is your friend too thin; do not diet him under a white ceiling, but give him air. Air will fill him. It is not the air alone that cures and fills, but what you breathe in with the air. You breathe in the spirit of the open. You breathe in the wideness of the sky; you reach out to the free horizon. It makes a man big, it builds a man within.”
“In the long halt, therefore, one has not stopped living, because one has ceased going onward. You get poised on your center. You feel the origins of joy and pain–deep down at the heart’s core, the place from which something in you is welling up all the while, welling up and overflowing, flowing away in waves and tides, to break on a mystical shore.”
“Self-expression is life. What gives more satisfaction to one’s being than to have expressed oneself.”
“Each day Nature puts her magic mirror in our hands. ‘Oh child, do you see yourself today?'”
Morning Trip (57)
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
– Joan Didion
Morning Trip (54)
“It is a release, like a dip in a healing, cool, fresh river. Now I am washed away in the river; after so much fussing, I am torn away and alone in the current. But I can swim, or rather, float. The self I held, I left with my towel on the shore, but I’m still alive; I haven’t drowned or died. Pieces of what I imagined I had to grip to me come floating along beside me. The current of the world is unraveling in faces and forms. Without my will the universe unrolls, and fills my arms with muscles, my heart with human concerns. The scintillating milky way of my back is a winking and shimmering constellation; my body itself is a river, a continent of rivers, a flickering, vibrating, shore less ocean of currents and channels, unfathomable, beginning less, endless. The living ride on life like the foam on the crest of a surge on the cosmic ocean.”
– Paul Fleischman
Morning Trip (18)
“Self Portrait
It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.”
– David Whyte
Fire in the Earth
Elisa's Spot 