The Shelburne Museum: The Round Barn

The Round Barn at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.

The people of wealth and power do not know what it means to take a place seriously: to think it worthy of love and study and careful work.  The Amish question “What will this do to our community?” tends toward the right answer for the world.  The only sustainable city—and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal—is a city in balance with its countryside.  The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding.

~ Wendell Berry

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Time traveling

D.C. War Memorial, Washington, D.C. (Memorial honoring the 26,000 D.C. citizens who served in World War I.)

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.  If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.

~ Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

Sharing with gratitude

Painting with fog.  (Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.  June 2012.)

Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again.  Sister, those who expected to rise did not, their beds became their cooling boards, and their blankets became their winding sheets.  And those dead folks would give anything, anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of that plowing that person was grumbling about.  So you watch yourself about complaining, Sister.  What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it.  If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.  Don’t complain.

~ Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

 

Stop and listen

Somewhere near Warren Lake. Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia. (June 2012)

There are times when we stop.  We sit still… We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

~ James Carroll