Some days I work part time in the South Bronx.
It is one of the most dilapidated parts of Bronx, a borough of New York City.
Most people don’t know that New York City is comprised of five boroughs and that Harlem is in Manhattan and quite expensive.
“The hub” is the retail heart of the South Bronx, located where four roads converge: East 149th Street, Willis, Melrose and Third Avenue. In the 1930s the Hub had movie palaces and vaudeville theaters and a few decades after it became a national symbol of urban decay.
I have witnessed some extreme poverty in my life given my travels and work ... read more »
Tagged choices, life, nyc, photography, photos, wanderlust
August 14th.
“The present is the whole of the past concentrated.” ~ Iqbal; Bernard Shaw on Tolstoy’s “What is Art”?; opinions about opinions; Anders, the homeless man in London, on books.
I awoke this Sunday morning in some rainforest. The rain, glossy chandeliers, was falling without crashing. It took me a minute to realize I was in New York City.
It was nice to take a break from putting thoughts on the braille made of words last Sunday. Does Stillness too take a break? No, I don’t think so. We do. It’s hard to swim in peace: no sharks of conflict that actually bite, no shore of tomorrow, no ship of yesterday, how long ... read more »
Tagged art, books, choices, life, politics, questions, relating, tolstoy, travel, wanderlust
An old Czech proverb: He who looks, finds. Loretta from AT&T. Bridges are made for crossing. “Lies About Love” by D.H. Lawrence.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I just lost everything I had written.
For the second time.
The first time was very early in the morning—the wake-up sky was still coddling the night—when I decided to not actually write down the thoughts that were downloading through Stillness. I was a sleepyhead in awe of the magnitude of Stillness looking out my window on equally sleepy Prague streets. But streets in Prague are always sleepy, waking up from a different time.
I had enjoyed the iceskateflow of thoughts zigzagging harmoniously, words leading an orchestra of thoughts in some ... read more »
Tagged choices, d.h. lawrence, life, prague, questions, relating, travel, wanderlust
It’s Sunday morning and I am writing from a small village near the Sovinec Castle. Owl’s Nest. That’s what Sovinec means in Czech. Sovinec is near a city called Olomouc. Yesterday we first traveled two and a half hours southeast of Prague to Brno and then north to Olomouc. We are quite east of Prague now. Olomouc is made of agricultural landscape where the sky is a moody painter and the earth is a palette. Capture that, lens. Feeling is a lens.
Usually when I write on Sunday mornings I feel Stillness offers Christmas presents for unwrapping—let’s see what’s under that tree of thought that grew so tall in one week? Some Sunday mornings I indeed ... read more »
Tagged art, choices, life, questions, relating, travel, wanderlust
In many ways I am finished.
I printed out my so called “creative clutter,” the Tuesday’s stories categorized under Tuesday’s Torrent and Fluck Tuesdays, and stared at the pages without reading. 160 pages of short narrative fiction. I wrote all of that in one year. That is a lot of Tuesdays. Approximately thirty-eight stories, I believe.
Today I re-read a paragraph from a story that I randomly picked. I couldn’t believe I had written it. This was neither a judgment of it being good nor bad. I was absolutely removed from what I was reading. I literally couldn’t believe I had thought these sentences that all went together and belonged to certain characters who wanted to ... read more »
Tagged art, authors, charles baxter, process of writing, sy safransky, travel, wanderlust, words
