Karma’s Photo Hunt: Before and after

Before the sun shines on their faces.

Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Crocuses and sunsets

A bald eagle in flight

Eagle Poem
by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

~From In Mad Love and War. © Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

A chilly Saturday in spring

Rooted on the dunes. (Cape Henlopen, Delaware.)

We have little needs and we have deeper needs.

We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs til we have almost lost our deeper needs in a kind of madness. Let us prepare now for the death of our present little life and the re-emergence in a bigger life in touch with the moving cosmos. It is a question practically of relationship. We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relationship to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual and re-awakening. We must once more practice the rituals of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath and the last. To these rituals we must return or we must evolve them to suit our needs. For the truth is we are perishing for the lack of fulfillment of our greater needs. We are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe.

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

~ D. H. Lawrence

For those who need a bit of hope

I found some in the garden this morning.

Rain and music

Morning dark and dreary.

When a group of people sing together, we make up a chorus. When birds do, it’s more like a whole symphony orchestra.

~ Laura Erickson, The Bird Watching Answer Book

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

~ Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion