Textures and Patterns

 from a recent trip to Blackwater Falls Nat'l Park:

    

"I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.”

- Annie Dillard, 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'

Who Can Ride the Dragon?

like a death, this is the true beginning

drag your body to the altar

quality of sweetness, rooted in sacrifice

drop down into the silence

healing by fire

eludes language

the doorkeeper

together in the woods

at the root of our own

she is the passion

swept away in a hurricane

visions in detail

all who dwell

the sacred balance

the sun goes down

and celebration

something in it, offering

chance to let go

return to the sacred

laid down her yarn.

Nature's Stunning Abstracts - Masterpiece "Paintings"

 

"Each man’s necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of; though he converses only with moles and fungi and disgraces his relatives, it is no matter if he knows what is steel to his flint."

  -Thoreau journal entry; excerpted in Thoreau and the Art of Life

 

 

"The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention."
 - Julia Margaret Cameron

 

 

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, 

for I have seen the shadow on the moon, 

and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church”

- Ferdinand Magellan

 

"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand." 

-Thoreau journal entry; excerpted in Thoreau and the Art of Life

  

 

"Life is much too important to be taken seriously."

 - Oscar Wilde

  

"Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows."

 - Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - 

the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science"

 - Albert Einstein from Living Philosophies

 

 

"One is never so strong as when one is broken."

 - Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

 

 

"Hand over the controls to the universe and go along for the ride. 

When you're a passenger, 

you can appreciate all the beautiful scenery that you might otherwise miss."

Author unknown

Take and Eat of this Body: a collection of words and images

"If one doubts the walking of the mountains, 

one doesn't even yet know one's own walking."

- Dogen

'Primordial Herald'

"The further a society drifts from the truth, 

the more it will hate those that speak it."

 - George Orwell

The talkative Wren

"Everyone has talent.  What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."

 - Erica Jong

'The Birth of Death' 

“For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back. But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant. I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.” - Isaiah 42:14-16

Firewood Rainbow

"I feel and think much as you do, 

care about many of the things you care about, 

although most people do not care about them. 

You are not alone."
- Kurt Vonnegut

'The Future's Provenance'

"It is ironic that, while concentrating 

on the defense of our country from enemies 

who would destroy it from without, 

we should be so heedless of those 

who would destroy it from within."

- Rachel Carson

 

​

Rippling Out Through Eons:  A Rock Found at Work

"Those who don't feel this Love pulling them like a river, 

those who don't drink dawn like a cup of spring water 

or take in sunset like supper, those who don't want to change, 

let them sleep." 

- Rumi

Cars that used to be - on their way to being something else...

“I’d rather be whole than good.”

 - Carl Jung

Beast of Beauty

Nature's Abstract

"Why should one reject the perfect in favor of the imperfect?  The precise and perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold and hard.  We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite.  Beauty must have room, must be associated with freedom.  Freedom, indeed, is beauty.  The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom."
  - Soetsu Yanagi  The Unknown Craftsman

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god." - Sir Francis Bacon

"Beauty is a form of genius - is higher than genius, as it needs no explanation.
It is one of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime,
or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon."

  - Oscar Wilde

Nature's Abstract

"Ask a toad what beauty is.”  - Voltaire

“The divine is not separate from the beast.” - Lenore Kandel

"There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion."  - Edgar Allen Poe

 “Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”  - Nadine Gordimer

Nature's Abstract

 “What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” - Keats

 “The heart suffers when it cannot see and touch beauty,
but beauty is not shy it is synonymous with existence.” - Hafiz

 “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.“

 - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

"There is a beast in man that needs to be exercised, not exorcised."  - Anton LeVey

 "Beauty lifts the soul and the sublime shatters the ego." - J. Campbell

"If women can learn to surrender the seductiveness of youth and to value themselves 

by other than adolescent standards of beauty, they can explore the dignity of elder beauty 

and reclaim the right to age without stigma."  - Z. Schachter-Shalomi 

Beatrice Wood - a hero of mine

 "Beauty will save the world."  - Fyodor Dostoevsky