A Monday meander: Solastalgia

Visiting the flower garden.

The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic, but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.

. . .

The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That is what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.

~ Joanna Macy

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Sifting

Lightning in a bottle.

It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.

~ George Harrison

There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it’s hurtling forward—toward what?

~ Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

A Monday meander: Refuge

At sunrise this morning.

As I envisage it, landscape projects into us not like a jetty or peninsula, finite and bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays yet often quickening and illuminating. We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places — but we are far less good at saying what place makes of us. For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?

~ Robert Macfarlane

Here and there and not nearly everywhere

Catching a glimpse of the mountains through the trees. (Somewhere on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Roanoke, Virginia.)

Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.

~ Tom Robbins

The House Sparrow

Building a nest.

If we learn to read the birds-and their behaviors and vocalizations-through them, we can read the world at large… if we replace collision with connection, learn to read these details, feel at home, relax, and are respectful–ultimately the birds will yield to us the first rite of passage: a close encounter with an animal otherwise wary of our presence.

~ Jon Young, What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World

Life

Gone to ground after the rain.

This moment is not life waiting to happen, goals waiting to be achieved, words waiting to be spoken, connections waiting to be made, regrets waiting to evaporate, aliveness waiting to be felt, enlightenment waiting to be gained. No. Nothing is waiting. This is it. This moment is life.

~ Jeff Foster, Falling in Love with Where You Are

A Monday meander: Wild and green

Hostas on a rainy day.

I believe that if one fathoms deeply one’s own neighborhood and the everyday world in which he lives, the greatest of worlds will be revealed.

~ Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution 

You can’t know who you are until you know where you are.

~ Wendell Berry