Still Sundays

February 6th.

Why Sundays? Iqbal on Halley’s Comet. Longfellow: “Footprints on the sands of time.” “Nothing new under the sun” except…


If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.


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I was up later than usual last night. Saturday night. It was late enough according to the official time keepers—-the hands on my clocks—to already be a Sunday. A beginning of that moment on a Sunday where Saturday night holds the weight of the entire week gone by. Midnight. This also meant it had already been Sunday morning with daylight in other parts of the world. I hugged that thought: a Sunday that stretches across the globe like the horizon that drips off to an edge that doesn’t exit.

Why Sunday? Why take Polaroid shots of stillness with my words on a Sunday morning? A fair question, given all mornings hold a certain stillness before the minutes become a swarm of bees we ignore, knowing it is the minutes that create the nectar we yearn from the day. So do the hours between 3: oo a.m. and 4:oo a.m., they too hold a unique stillness. The hours that belong to a day that doesn’t exist. I come from those hours. My mother told me so: I was born around those hours. Perhaps that is why I am going to live my life about a time that only exists in my visions.


Why Sunday? I have always had an affinity for Sundays ever since I was young. I suppose it is because they are so definitive in the bliss and blues they hold: sundays are a union of beginning and completion. From the very early morning we are aware this day will not last. Most people even dread the next day: Monday. Sundays are a turnstile of moments where we enter one by one into a zone that we love and know we can’t hold on. Sundays remind me of how all days really are, we just don’t notice. Sunday mornings are my tribute to what I understand yet despite knowing I can’t always practice. It’s humbling and empowering.

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A dear friend and I ended our private tête-à-tête last week where she shut the door to the discussion by saying, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Although a common phrase now, I believe that is from Ecclesiastes. Few days after that, I bumped into an unexpected dialogue of the same nature. This time the individual, not a close friend, was pinning me with the corsage of compliments on my writing: “I wonder how you continue to write despite knowing it’s all been written before.” The following day I shared with a different person a short story I had written for a journal. Although my story was well received, it reminded this individual of a different story in some fiction anthology.

I have already reconciled with the ‘anxiety of influence’.  I also understand why I must write even if what I have to offer has already been written.  So what was I feeling? It was something new and I couldn’t quite articulate it until a new kindred connection asked, “Why do we have this desire to create something new? Original?” Yes! That was a better way of summarizing the span of the entire week’s unrelated but connected discussions.


Having spend some nights with these thoughts and taken them into my yoga practice, I understand the following.

Firstly, I don’t think most feel the burden to be original. If by some chance another consciously does, it is charged with ego’s seduction for approval. Secondly, for those select few who authentically feel this angst to be original it is not so much to be original but to share the reality that one perceives.

The poet Iqbal wrote,

Yesterday morning, 15th May 1910, at about 4, I saw that glorious visitor of our hemisphere known as Halley’s comet. Once in seventy-five years this superb swimmer of infinite space appears on our skies. The state of my mind was quite unique. I felt as if some thing indescribably vast had been closed up within the narrow limits of my clay; yet the thought that I could not see this wanderer again brought home to me the painful fact of my littleness. For the moment all ambition was killed in me.


When all ambition is killed and the only desire that remains is to project through a photo, a drawing, words, or music what one feels or sees we are nothing short of original. Always.

This grand undertaking to be in the now against the dam of past that no longer exists but somehow stills seems to generate enough power to short circuit our perception of the moment, with limited tools (a paintbrush! a thesaurus! a lens! a digital application!) makes artists champions in a match against time.


No doubt the eye sees what the mind already knows,* but the mind is weak against the heart that bleeds to be felt in the now.  A consistent practice to engage with the dialogue between mind and body teaches even deja vu is new.

There is indeed ‘nothing new under the sun’ except the Now.


Jonathan Haidt writes in the Introduction of his book, The Happiness Hypothesis:

Wisdom is now so cheap and abundant that it floods over us from calendar pages, tea bags, bottle caps, and mass e-mail messages forwarded by well-meaning friends. We are in a way like residents of Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel—an infinite library whose books contain every possible string of letters and, therefore, somewhere an explanation of why the library exists and how to use it. But Borges’s librarians suspect that they will never find that book amid the miles of nonsense.

Our prospects are better. Few of our potential sources of wisdom are nonsense, and many are entirely true. Yet, because our library is also effectively infinite—-no one person can ever read more than tiny fraction—we face the paradox of abundance: quantity undermines the quality of our engagement.

Words of wisdom, the meaning of life, perhaps even the answer sought by the Borges’s librarians—-all of these may wash over us every day, but they can do little for us unless we savor them, engage with them, question them, improve them, and connect them to our lives.


The attempt is not to be original in our creative endeavors but to savor, engage, question, and maybe improve, but most importantly, connect with how we understand now.

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I leave you with the stillness wrapped in one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Henry Wadswroth Longfellow:

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!–
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,–act in the living present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.







*Contrary to Appearances photography.

10 responses to “Still Sundays”

  1. KChavda says:

    In keeping with this lovely post, let me quote Ahmed Shawqi:

    “Years merely returning and time repeating itself // I swear by your life there is nothing new in this world…”

    What I really feel about this whole issue: Let us assume that perhaps, most of the things worth writing have already been written and most of the things worth discovering have already been found. Yet each era, each decade, each century brings out individuals who look at things from a different perspective. All these new perspectives collectively become different facets of the same, “already discovered” thing.

    To be original, then, is perhaps to see things in a different light, the light which your own unique intellect generates. That nobody can copy, it is your own.

  2. Mary Rice-Boothe says:

    Why are we always in search of the new thing? Why not just appreciate that which is old wrapped up in a new perspective?….this search for the new is what is killing our public education system…let it not also destroy writers too….then what would we have left?

    Thanks Annie!

  3. Dear Annie,
    As a young boy (one of a brood of seven boys), my very brilliant mother had many, many occasions to recite a part of that Longfellow poem. Fortunately or unfortunately, she could never remember if the line was – “And the grave is not its goal”, or “And the grave is its goal”. It wasn’t until quite recently that I remembered to Google it to find out which was correct! Regardless, I had long ago come to terms with the thought that the goal of life and the role of death would be, and should be, left in my youthful perpetual puzzlement. Thanks again for letting me spend a bit of my Sunday with you.

  4. kari m. says:

    Dear Annie,
    I read somewhere else today; ‘Every day the (over)culture will try to steal us away from ourselves. Every night we have to steal ourselves back again. Every every every single time.’ When reading your posts I feel I reconnect with my own wisdom, so thank you! 🙂

  5. LunaJune says:

    always amazed at what comes through in the middle of the night
    always listen to the taping into and the flowing out of those late night ramblings

    yes Longfellow was right…

    at the end
    I believe
    we will be asked…

    did you have a good time?

    YES !

  6. Miridunn says:

    Concerning originality, I have thought, too, there are no new ideas and precious few themes upon which to write. Yet, undaunted, I am driven by the desire to say that which has already been said in a novel and beautiful way, in words that only can own arrange themselves “just so” in my own unique mind.

    And I suspect there is great irony in Borges’ librarians endlessly seeking a book to tell them how to use the library ~ for in doing so they proved the book to be quite meaningless: seek, and ye shall find …something.

    Thanks for this “Still Sunday”

  7. Michael says:

    To repeat a theme in these comments, I would much rather be timely than original. As individuals and as a species, we seem to have a hard time learning the important lessons, hence history, in a way but never truly or completely, repeats itself. Exploring those universal truths again and again seems to be the only logical recourse.

    As always Annie, thanks.

  8. artvaughan says:

    Ah yes,

    To be original, give up the desire to be original
    To be your self, give up the thought of self
    To find, leave off searching in chaos
    Let all settle

    Thank you, Annie, for the timely reminder

  9. It was very good to read this sane and even mellow reflection on what we create, what we pass on transformed, along with the great comments it elicited.

    Your call “to savor, engage, question, and maybe improve, but most importantly, connect with how we understand now” is a workable ethic for approaching the Babel of words that most people now encounter.

    It is very original, and brave, to quote Longfellow in 2011, and I’m so glad you did. What an antidote to cyncism and despair! “Life is real! Life is earnest!”–how glad I am to read such an affirmation! Not a dream or just some game to play shrewdly, but something noble to meet with everything one’s got. “To labor and to wait”–a phrase equally good for taking into action or meditation.

    thanks,
    lucy