A Monday meander: Summer vacation edition

Along the way, a field of sunflowers. We stopped to take a look (and a couple of photos).

It’s not enough to love something–or someone. Of course you love a person or art or music or the theatre. But you have to imagine that this person or this thing is trapped in a house afire, and the fire is apathy, and the fire is ignorance, and you have to go into the house all the time, day after day, year after year, and put out the flames and save the thing you love and rebuild the house in which it lives, and show it to others who will come to the rescue when you no longer can. Love is cheap and silly–a moron can love ice cream–but devotion is something worth talking about.

–Eva Le Gallienne

A Wednesday morning

This morning, in her glory.

I wake up, open my eyes, and a world appears. It is a familiar world – more so than usual in these days of semi-lockdown – but even more familiar is the experience of ‘self’ – of being me – that glides into consciousness at more-or-less the same time. This experience of selfhood is so mundane that its appearance goes by entirely unnoticed, unless actively paid attention to. We take our selves for granted, but we shouldn’t.

~ Anil Seth, Catching Sight of Yourself

Beauty kick-starts our attention. The real sublime. To behold it is almost scary because we suddenly have a longing to stand for something. Beauty not as generic but specific, troubling in what it may call forth in us.

~ Martin Shaw, How to Recapture Your Imagination

A Monday meander: Elderhood

Sunrise clouds painted acros a morning sky.

It annoys me when people say, ‘Even if you’re old, you can be young at heart!’ Hiding inside this well-meaning phrase is a deep cultural assumption that old is bad and young is good. What’s wrong with being old at heart, I’d like to know? Wouldn’t you like to be loved by people whose hearts have practiced loving for a long time?”

~Susan Moon

Exploring anger

Flying into the sun.

We often fear that the Revolution needed is too big for what we can give.
Too much change is required inside, outside.
And we are too small.
But all that is required is that you step into the truth of your life.
And speak it, write it, paint it, dance it.
That you shine your light on your truth, for the world to see.
And as hundreds, then thousands, then millions do this – each sparking the courage of yet more –
Suddenly we have a world alight with truth.

~ Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman 

A Wednesday walk

A patchwork of colors and plants in the scrounger’s garden.

The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so.  The configuration will never be repeated.

~ Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek