Fruits

Fuzziness

Before World War II, Berenice Abbott roamed New York’s streets photographing buildings, and after it, Helen Levitt photographed children playing in the streets while Weegee photographed the underworld of fresh corpses on sidewalks and prostitutes in paddy wagons.  One imagines them wandering purposefully like hunter-gatherers with the camera a sort of basket laden with the day’s spectacles, the photographers leaving us not their walks, as poets do, but the fruits of those walks.

~ Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

The first snow

Snow at sunrise (near the lagoon).

A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

A November day at the beach

At the Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival

Miss Erstwhile:  “It is such a relief, Mr. Nobley, to already know that you find this exercise vulgar and your partner unworthy.  It saves us the idle chitchat.”

Mr. Nobley:  “And yet you chat away.”

~ Shannon Hale, Austenland

A walk with the wind

Oak leaves on a windy day. (Wind streaks enhanced in Photoshop because I thought it would make a good abstract image.)

The Universe story is the quintessence of reality.  We perceive the story.  We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs.  We can read the story of the Universe in the trees.  Everything tells the story of the Universe.  The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively.  The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story.  If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

~ Thomas Berry

Pain and healing

Smooth as silk

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you — all of the expectations, all of the beliefs — and becoming who you are.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Passion and purpose

The roses are still blooming

I used to think that going to the jungle made my life an adventure.  However, after years of unusual work in exotic places, I realize that it is not how far off I go, or how deep into the forest I walk that gives my life meaning.  I see that living life fully is what makes life — anyone’s life, no matter where they do or do not go — an adventure.

~ Maria Fadiman, geographer

Taller than the trees

Stretching to the sky

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.

~ Henry David Thoreau