Featherglass’ Top Ten Posts Thus Far

It’s time for an update of the Top Ten Posts Thus Far on featherglass.

The top post of all time is the one on the Top 10 Things To Do This Summer, written about a year ago today. Summer is long and slow, a marching band playing on a pier of long days and slow nights. That this is a much-Googled topic must mean there’s a need for ideas to fill in the hours.

One summer night, spent in a place where there are four seasons, lies untouched in memory.  A girl on her first trip to the US, my newlymade friend, stayed in my summer rental in a Midwestern university town in the US. That evening, we went grocery shopping at midnight at a 24-hour supermarket. We rode pillion on two motorbikes while our friends took us rolling up and down hills in the little college town, roaring past fireflies in the dark. We talked until dawn, and found ourselves ordering ham and eggs at a local diner at six a.m. One day in my life.

Continue reading

Love What You Do. Get Good At It.

Recently, an online news source featured some commencement addresses, speeches given at the graduation ceremonies at notable institutions in the US. My favourite was the one given by TV comedian and satirist, Jon Stewart, of the Emmy-award-winning The Daily News with Jon Stewart.

Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they may. – Award-winning TV satirist Jon Stewart’s commencement address to the class of ’84 at the College of William and Mary, Virginia. This address is worth a read in its entirety, filled with Stewart’s signature brand of dry wit, cynicism, irreverently yet elegantly delivered in a public address on a formal occasion. 

A further sample: I am honored to be here and to receive this honorary doctorate. When I think back to the people that have been in this position before me from Benjamin Franklin to Queen Noor of Jordan, I can’t help but wonder what has happened to this place. Continue reading

Always Summer

He Enjoys Brideshead Revisited (Credit: Nedrichards)

June bids the start of summer, and though things don’t change where I live–either it rains or it doesn’t–in my mind, the sky is a stronger shade of blue, the morning air as soft as the evening twilight, and one decides to collect white dresses. Afterall, these are like snowflakes; no two are ever alike.

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Embrittlement

Something has died

and I can’t hide and

I just can’t fake it . . .  Carol King, Tapestry (1971)

Burnout is something you’ve all felt before. That feeling of deep tiredness, fatigue, that terrifying listlessness one struggles against.

One cause of burnout, I learned recently, is not so much that we’re solving problems, but that we are trying to solve the same problems over and over. Continue reading

Pink

The last in a 12-part series on colour. 

Bridal Pink, cultivated by Eugene Boerner in 1...

Wonderment

Then a wind blew;
And he who had forgot he moved
Lonely amid the green and silver morning weather,
Suddenly grew
Aware of clouds and trees
Gleaming and white and shafted, shaken together
And blown to music by the ruffling breeze.

Like flush of wings
The moment passed: he stood
Dazzled with blossom in the swaying wood;
Then he remembered how, through all swift things,
This mortal scene stands built of memories,—
Shaped by the wise
Who gazed in breathing wonderment,
And left us their brave eyes
To light the ways they went.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967),  The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1918)

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