A Monday meander: Time traveling

“Lotus Blooms” by artist Karen Fisher. (North Carolina Botanical Garden 2022 Sculpture in the Garden)

Lotus flowers lead harrowing journeys. Their seeds sprout in murky swamp water, thick with dirt and debris and snarls of roots. For a lotus to bloom, she must forge her way through this terrible darkness, avoid being eaten by fish and insects, and keep pressing onward, innately knowing, or at least hoping, that there is sunlight somewhere above the water’s surface, if she can only summon the strength to get there. And when she does, she emerges unscathed by her journey and blooms triumphantly.

~ Sarah Jio, All the Flowers in Paris

If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now and when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.

~ Masaru Emoto, Secret Life of Water

A weekend of walks

Autumn colors.

Like leaves in the autumn or wood in the fire, all things pass. But, there is a moment in which we can see things as they are.

~ Sandra Hannebohm

A Monday meander: The greening

The Green Man has been at work.

We sat in silence, letting the green in the air heal what it could.

~ Erica Bauermeister, The Scent Keeper

Life itself is as much a long walk as it is a long conversation, and the ways along which we walk are those along which we live.

~ Tim Ingold, Ways of Walking

Some fun

Trying to decide between the latte and the macchiatto.

Some days you’re just not sure what you’re in the mood to drink.  There are mornings when any old plain, black coffee will do, and other mornings when you know it’s going to be a long, exhausting day.  Those are the days you treat yourself to something special.

Playing along with Kathy.  Won’t you join us?

Walking with the Walktoberists

A map, to help us find the way. (A sandy topographic map in the Nature Center at Blackwater Falls State Park.)

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.

~ Jim Harrison, from After Ikkyū and Other Poems (Shambhala, 1996)

Circling back around

Little hands.  Artwork gift for Mother’s Day.

… holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.

~ Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years

Walktober 2020

A little earthiness.  (This is one of the biggest mushrooms I’ve ever seen around here.  I though it was fake at first.  There were several more scattered throughout the woods.)

SOLVITUR AMBULANDO.

This ancient Latin phrase loosely translates as “It is solved by walking.”  A walk is a journey that requires very little — neither planning nor passport, neither ticket nor equipment.  Nearly always at our disposal, a walk provides so much more than just a change of scenery.  Walking has helped me decide what is wise and what is foolhardy, has made me fall in love with a place, has batted away my melancholy.  Walking has helped me loosen the grip technology has on my life, giving me space and permission to disconnect from my devices that beg for my attention and feed my anxiety.  Most of all, walking has nurtured my creativity as I struggle to give tangible form to abstract ideas.

~ Bonnie Smith Whitehouse, in the introduction to Afoot and Lighthearted: A Journal for Mindful Walking