A Monday meander: Happy Solstice

News from family.  (Taken by M the Younger and sent to me, where I heavily edited it so that the boys are not so readily identifiable.)

To go into the dark with a light
is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark,
go without sight.
And find
that the dark too
blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

~ Wendell Berry

A Monday meander: Life in the Bogs

Perched for a moment.

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

A Monday meander: Heatwave

Droopy.

We have separated matter and spirit and through the power of this collective attitude have starved the world.

~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Awakening the World

Once when I was younger I went out and sat under the sky and looked up and asked it to take me back. What I should have done was gone to the swamp and bog and ask them to bring me back because, if anything is, mud and marsh are the origins of life. Now I think of the storm that made chaos, that the storm opened a door. It tried to make over a world the way it wanted it to be. At school I learned that storms create life, that lightning, with its nitrogen, is a beginning; bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It’s into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time.

~ Linda Hogan

Greetings from NE Ohio

 

Sunlight traversing the path.

In a flash of wonderment she saw firm, continuous ground under her feet, stretching from back then to right now and on and on as far as her eyes could take her.

~ Ann Brashares, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

Beauty

One frosty morning.

Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.

~John Ruskin

11. The wind is in a hurry today

When night and day greet each other.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

A Monday meander

Entering the woods.

A Night Full of Talking

A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets. Everything
has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.

~ Rumi, From “A Year With Rumi: Daily Readings”