If we were having coffee: Sharing a sunset

Yesterday’s sunset.

Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

~Abraham Joshua Heschel

If we were having coffee: This week on the ranch

Rust and spokes.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

~ Anais Nin

If we were having coffee: Before summer returns

Taking a walk around the pond at Breezy Acres (in the Bogs of Ohio).

Just that you do the right thing.  The rest doesn’t matter.  Cold or warm.  Tired or well-rested.  Despised or honored.  Dying… or busy with other assignments.  Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life.  There as well:  “To do what needs doing.”  Look inward.  Don’t let the true nature of anything elude you.

Only there, delight and stillness… when jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help.  You’ll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep going back to it.

~ Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations

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

If we were having coffee: The Cleveland Film Festival

View from our hotel room when we arrived in Cleveland on the afternoon of the 31st of March 2017.

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

~ Federico Fellini

If we were having coffee: Beach day

The beach crowd.

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

~ Rachel Carson

Unplugged