A Saturday saunter

Ice on the beach at the Point.

The least movement is of importance to all nature.  The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

~ Blaise Pascal

Choices

The last sunset of 2020.

Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be. If this sounds difficult and unnerving, it’s because it is. Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety. He heightens this anxiety by pointing out that what you do really matters. You should make your choices as though you were choosing on behalf of the whole of humanity, taking the entire burden of responsibility for how the human race behaves. If you avoid this responsibility by fooling yourself that you are the victim of circumstances or of someone else’s bad advice, you’re failing to meet the demands of human life and choosing a fake existence, cut off from your own authenticity.

~ Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café

And now for something

Water, an abstract.   (This one is mine.)

True emptiness is also an openness of being. It is an ongoing receptivity to the wonder of life.

~ Beverly Lanzetta

‘Emptiness’ means empty of a separate self. It is full of everything, full of life. The word emptiness should not scare us. It is a wonderful word. To be empty does not mean non-existent. Emptiness is the ground of everything. Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

The red-winged blackbird

Perched in a pine.

Hope is roving gypsy
With laughter on her tongue,
And the blue sky and sunshine
Alone, can keep her young;
And year by year she lingers
Under a budding tree
To join the red-wings’ chorus:
On-caree!

~ Dora Reed Goodale, 1902

A Wednesday wander: Past and present

I almost threw this away.

Have no fear of perfection — you’ll never reach it.

~ Salvador Dali

One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist…..Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.

~ Stephen Hawking

I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

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

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