Unable to Decide, While We Trudge

Fernand Toussaint (Belgian artist, 1873-1955) Lady in the Green Dress with MirrorDear Spring
by Charles Simic

Will you please hurry with your preparations?
We are freezing up north as you procrastinate
Like a rich lady with too many gorgeous outfits
To choose from, spending hours in front of
A mirror, trying them on and unable to decide,

While we trudge to the mailbox through wind
And snow, extract our unwilling fingers
From a glove to check if there’s a letter
From you, or just a bitty postcard, saying:
I’m leaving Carolina today, hurrying your way
With my new wardrobe of flowers and birds.

The tease! I bet she starts and forgets one of her
Hand-painted silk fans and has to go back,
While we stamp our feet and wipe our noses here,
Worrying the wood for the stove is running out,
The snow on the roof will bring the house down.

Strategic Patience

Art and architecture history professor Jennifer Roberts requires her students to write a twenty-page research paper on a single work of art. Before they begin the research, however, they are expected to spend three hours in front of the actual work. No electronic devices. No distractions. They have to rely on their vision, curiosity, and skills of observation to navigate the slow passing of time.  

John Singleton Copley, Boy with a Squirrel (1765), oil on canvas.

"Just because you've looked at something doesn't mean you've seen it. Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. Or, in slightly more general terms, just because you have access to something doesn't mean you have learned it.What turns access into learning is time and strategic patience…

For me this is not just a lesson for people who are going to become art historians or go to museums. It's a key lesson for students to see the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and—I think most crucially—it's a lesson in being skeptical about immediate surface appearances. And I can't think of very many skills that are more important in the twenty-first century than that."

~ Jennifer Roberts, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching 2013 conference on "Essentials"

The Problem with Waiting

The problem with waiting for someone, whether that wait is an hour or a lifetime, is everyone's 'clock' is different. So what you might consider forever is only a little while to them, or vice versa.

~ Jonathan Carroll

'I Will Wait' taken from the new album 'Babel' released on Sep 24th 2012. 
http://www.mumfordandsons.com

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See also: Remains of the Day

This Hum is the Silence

Mountain Fog, North Carolina by David Ploskonka@ploskonkad

"At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same.

This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep — just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it.

There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable.

The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is."

~ Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (discovered on whiskey river)

Who Knows?

Waiting Together
by Daron Larson

Two pairs of unhurried eyes
gaze out quietly from the bench,
alert for a bus.

The woman is young,
the boy not quite old enough
for school, yet old enough to learn,
attending to the world, open,
not insisting on attention from it.

Anyone would call him well behaved.

I wonder what could be more important to her
than the silence surrounding them,
sleepy cars,
humming houses, chirping trees,
their own breathing.

Who knows what comforts other people's earbuds
are singing to them? Whispering?

Who knows where and what
others are coming from this morning,
or where they are headed?

Maybe isolation is exactly what they need right now.
Maybe they want something more.

All these questions marks floating above silent faces,
begging to be answered.