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

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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

The flowers are insane this year

A touch of sunlight.

The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.

~ Lenny Bruce

In every age “the good old days” were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

~ Brooks Atkinson

A little peculiar

A posting.  (Pocomoke River State Park.)

The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look… To form the intention of new awareness is already to transform and be transformed.

~ Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows:  How Great Poems Transform the World

Have an uncomfortable mind; be strange. Be disturbed: by what is happening on the planet, and to it; by the cruelty, and stupidity humanity is capable of; by the unbearable beauty of certain music, and the mysteries and failures of love, and the brief, confusing, exhilarating hour of your own life.

– Kim Addoniziok, Bukowski in a Sundress

Sitting by the pond on a lovely day

As above.

I give thanks for arriving
Safely in a new dawn,
For the gifts of eyes
To see the world,
The gift of mind
To feel at home
In my life.
The waves of possibility
Breaking on the shore of dawn,
The harvest of the past
That awaits my hunger,
And all the furtherings
This new day will bring.

~John O’Donohue

Questions without answers

Chaos. (Not really.  The snow geese know what they’re doing, but it looks chaotic, doesn’t it?  Assateague Island, Virginia.  I know this is blurry in the wrong spots but I kind of like it anyhow.  It seems to capture the motion.)

I really am a pessimist. I’ve always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

~ Normal Mailer

Lesson of the crocus

By the garden on a February day.

On Tuesday, two flowers popped up out of the grass near the garden.  On Wednesday, there was snow and freezing rain and no sign of the flowers (any flowers) anywhere.

If everything changes, if everything ends, then everything matters.  Everything.

Everything is passing… Enjoy its momentariness.

~ Mooji

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope — a slight change, and all patterns alter.

~ Sharon Salzberg