You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
~Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
I try to picture Franz, a mustache? A good Czech. Maybe I'll read that one.
The taste of the new Hawaiian Kona coffee is much more mild with milk then is the other double espresso. And not nearly as strong.
Great bands of clouds all day. Muggy. Stormy. But without rain in our front yard thus far. Just now I hear the high winds gusting.
I was telling the new person who is here now to care for me how I am reading a book about the art of wasting a day… [Paula Hofl ] It's a book about leisure, intentional savoring and enjoyment… Intentional care of the interior life… Some days I think to myself if I get any further into the inside of my interior I'm simply going to ooze out my ears and disappear.
Still I wonder. If there's no one watching the world happening than what is happening? The things we're doing? What about the rest of it? I long for a life beyond my lists.
I say "Franz! I've been looking at the world on purpose all of my life!" Very early on it started. You're going to have to wait – heard that about 500 times a day as a child and before you knew it I figured out how to do it and to enjoy it. It took until age 12 to find a neighbor kid as weird as I was and who could invite you into the fourth dimension of his third universe to captain a ship he created to modify another retrofitted version he had dreamt up six years earlier.
What if when people said, be patient for a minute, we said – Thank God! Back to life even for a moment simply as a being instead of an arrow pointed at something for the sake of something other than the pleasantness of being present to the present and what it brings when we finally cease our stirring.
I don't have less to do I have more to be thankful for because I try to notice because I love beauty and in its presence, especially outside in the great wild earthly lively, I feel completely alive – here's why and here's why and there's why and another example, and this one and that one… And such is the finest rhythm of any day that anyone could ever live – look… Slow down a minute and look… And listen and see there … it's at your feet.
