Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
~ Confucious
When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
~ John Lennon
Dragonflies are reminders that we are light and we can reflect light in powerful ways if we choose to do so.
~ Robyn Nola
We speak of things “catching our gaze,” “calling our attention,” “grabbing our focus,” and those are all quite precise ways of speaking, because as we’re wandering the world, things solicit our attention, draw us into dialog, a kind of conversation without words. A fallen leaf on the ground calls my attention, and so I slow down to stop and gaze at it. And so, in my experience, this leaf is not dead, though it’s been lying on the ground for days. It has its own agency. It has its own power, its potency. And so, it is with everything we experience.
~ David Abrams, The Ecology of Perception, Emergence Magazine
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
~ Wendell Berry
The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common.
In healing the scattered members come together.
In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.~ Wendell Berry, excerpt from What Are People For?: Essays
(you can read more here)
Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Continue reading “If we were having coffee: Blustery day edition”
It should not surprise that so elemental a word as point has several geographic meanings. Wherever land meets water, from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Point Pleasant, Florida, point describes the projection of dry ground into the surrounding sea, bay, lake, or river. In Appalachia, point may refer to the termination of a mountain ridge projecting into a confluence of valleys. Even on prairies, points abound…In river morphology, a point is the inside or convex curve of a meander, where sediment tends to aggrade. The condition of vegetation on a stream’s meander point is a useful indicator of its ecological health: if vegetation is colonizing the point, the health trend is likely positive. The state of the meander point is usually a better indicator of the stream’s overall condition than the presence or absence of erosion on the concave or outer curve of the channel. Erosion and consequent bank collapse on the outside of the bend can be a natural feature of the stream’s morphological dynamic.
~ William DeBuys, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney
At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one – which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.
~Dag Hammarskjöld
Was there ever a time when you felt suddenly alive? It was like the doors of the world opened for a minute and you could see directly into life. You were able to touch life directly and were not lost in your fears and worries. This experience may not have been during a big event like performing in a play or playing in a championship game; it may have been while walking in the woods or talking to a friend. All of a sudden you felt alive, awake. This quality of waking up, or penetrating into life, we could call mindfulness. Mindfulness simply means being aware, being present. When you are breathing and know that you are breathing, that is mindfulness of breathing.
~ Soren Gordhamer
Continue reading “If we were having coffee: Late summer adventures edition”
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breezes at dawn 