watching

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam__ waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam__ curse. __ursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee._ A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia.

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt__ing eye and say, __o you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?_ The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky__ stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I__l not go northing this year. I__l stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow__ fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow__ seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.

Casting a curious gaze down on planet Earth, extra-terrestrial beings could well be forgiven for assuming that we humans are programmed in every move we make, by a palm-sized, oblong, slab of glass. More perplexing than that, who on earth could convince them otherwise ?

I like to prowl ordinary places.I feel sorry for us all or glad for us allcaught alive togetherand awkward in that way.there's nothing better than the jokeof usthe seriousness of usthe dullness of us

I like to prowl ordinary placesand taste the people-from a distance.

It's sometimes funny to watch some people doing something the wrong way but doing it confidently. Even more funny, they succeeded.

The Best films are a small amount, some films learn us things which we won't forget, others just show us one of the things which we already know others just lose our time. But which are the best? and Which you will choose?.. Are the best two questions you must ask yourself before you start watching a film!

You can observe a lot by watching.

I recorded my hair this morning, tonight I'm watching the highlights.

We owe a lot to Thomas Edison - if it wasn't for him, we'd be watching television by candlelight.

I'm obsessed with zombies. I like watching zombie movies and I read zombie books.

Watching movies is my one distraction.

Watching 'Girls' has just given me renewed courage.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

I grew up watching a lot of stuff, like 'Teen Titans.'

My dad's not here, but he's watching in heaven.

The forest smelled fresh here and the ground was soft, carpeted by leaves and fallen pine needles. It was tranquil and enchanting in its way. Ursula was lovely; she just wasn__ a naiad. Her hair was dark and sleek, and so long it fell below her waist, swaying this way and that as she walked. Her eyes were a piercing blue, always aware, and she had a keen eye for the smallest details. She may have been a merchant, but she__ also trained as an archer for the city militia, and she could easily spot movement at a distance. That was her intention now; it was just a different kind of movement.