Center of all centers, core of cores, almond self-enclosed and growing sweet — all this universe, to the furthest stars and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.
Now you feel how nothing clings to you; your vast shell reaches into endless space, and there the rich, thick fluids rose and flow. Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke (The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)
In October my sister and I spent a couple of nights at the Nauset Knoll Motor Lodge in Orleans on Cape Cod. The big draw was that the motel had a short path to Nauset Beach, a ten mile stretch of seashore facing the open Atlantic. We could hear the waves from our motel room. Pure joy!
eternity
Wildlife sightings: from the road we saw wild turkeys and a coyote; hopping across our path to the beach we saw a bunny; and at the beach we saw gulls of course, and a little plover running along the water’s edge, and a seal bobbing in the waves.
parallax
One afternoon we spent two hours meandering on the beach. Nothing but sand, sea and sky as far as our eyes could see. Beverly, the geologist, was collecting stones, and I was taking pictures. And contemplating the universe, the oneness of all things.
Being awake. Resting in the happening of this moment, exactly as it is. Relaxing the need to understand or to make things different than they are. Opening the heart. Just this — right here, right now. ~ Joan Tollifson (Resting in the Happening of this Moment)
posing
infinity
We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves — the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds — never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake. ~ Pema Chödrön (Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living)
yawning (no sound)
dune grass
Few places on the earth possess a nature so powerful and so unspoiled that it would remind anyone living in a concrete world that he once belonged to a pre-industrial civilization. ~ Liv Ullmann (Changing)
adolescent gull
ebb and flow
a young gull
sandscape
weather worn
windswept
It was windy and chilly and we were bundled up well. I even wore my mittens when I was not taking pictures. But eventually it was time to go back to our room and get ready for dinner. So back up the path to the motel. Our window was the one on the right in the white section of the building. There are only 12 rooms. A quiet, beautiful, windswept place to stay.
view of our room from the path leading to the beach Nauset Knoll Motor Lodge, Orleans, Massachusetts
view from our room, a hill with a path through the brambles, the parking lot and the beach are between the lawn and the water
I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. ~ Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
“The Flowers of Middle Summer” by Henri Fantin-Latour
The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after. ~ Natalie Babbitt (Tuck Everlasting)
Light is the mother of life. The sun brings light or color. It causes grasses, crops, leaves, and flowers to grow. The sun brings forth the erotic charge of the curved earth; it awakens her wild sensuousness. ~ John O’Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)
7.23.17 ~ flower box at Mystic Seaport
When you possess light within, then you see it externally. ~ Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin: 1939-1944)
But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called – called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come. ~ Jack London (The Call of the Wild)
