Playtime

Making silly things.

Play is an activity enjoyed for its own sake. It is our brain’s favorite way of learning and maneuvering.

–Diane Ackerman

play.  V.  Middle English pleien, from Old English plegan, plegian “move lightly and quickly, occupy or busy oneself, amuse oneself; engage in active exercise; frolic; engage in children’s play; make sport of, mock; perform music.” It is from Proto-West Germanic *plegōjanan “occupy oneself about” (source also of Old Saxon plegan “vouch for, take charge of,” Old Frisian plega “tend to,” Middle Dutch pleyen “to rejoice, be glad,” German pflegen “take care of, cultivate”).

— Etymonline.com

Smoke in the air

A smoky sunrise.

We live our comfortable lives in the shadow of a disaster of our own making. That disaster is being brought about by the very things that allow us to live our comfortable lives.

~ David Attenborough

To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible.

~ Rebecca Solnit, Not Too Late (a book but there is also a website:  Not Too Late)

Season’s greetings

This is Tag, an Elf on the Shelf. This is where he ended up on Christmas Eve.

This is the pruning period, when life can look pretty drab; the dead branches of our old habits will be lying all around us and the new leaves will not yet have begun to grow.

But for all of us, if we keep at our pruning carefully, the spring is bound to come.

There will still be gardening to do, but when we see our new ways blossoming and the good fruit we have begun to bear for others, this pruning of self-will will be a source of lasting satisfaction.

~ Eknath Easwaran

Officially Walktober

Little hand, small flowers from the meadow.

[Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.  It is the one way of freedom.  If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.

~ Elizabeth von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

~ Barbara Brown Taylor

Springtime walks and adventures

Ice flowers in the scrounger’s garden.

It’s hard to walk briskly at this time of year; the accelerating pace of unfolding spring slows my own. I repeatedly stop- to watch what’s moving. Soon the torrent of migrants will completely overwhelm my ability to keep up with all the changes. But it’s easy to revel in the exuberance and the sense of rebirth, renewal.

~ Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

If we were having coffee: Celebrating a birthday

A puppy-themed birthday celebration for a very special little boy.

Birthdays! What music in the world! In these unresting times, when nothing intellectual, economic, social, political, seems stable; when customs and traditions hoary with age are mixed with explosive elements, this oldest of institutions is not in danger of yielding to destructive forces.

~J.R. Macduff, Birthdays, 1893

The sun bridge

The sunlight was playing in the cattails at the back of the pond yesterday evening, creating a bridge between here and there, here and there being wherever/whenever you want/need them to be. Perhaps in the middle is a place called Common Ground where we can get away from the extremes and remember love, respect, and kindness.