I find ecstasy in living; the mere sense of living is joy enough. How do most people live without any thoughts? There are many people in the world – you must have noticed them in the streets – how do they live? How do they get the strength to put on their clothes in the morning?
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 1845-1886)
Music became a healer for me, and I learned to listen with all my being.
~ Eric Clapton
(Clapton: The Autobiography)
I let my music take me where my heart wants to go.
~ Cat Stevens
♫ (The Wind) ♫
There is a spirit in all music, the spirit has the ability to conjure up thoughts even pictures of something that happened or you wished would happen or you anticipate happening. Music has the ability to create ideas in you and me. It has the ability to encourage us to be creative.
~ Maya Angelou
(Facebook, August 25, 2010)
In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.
~ Barbara Hurd
(Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs & Human Imagination)
As darkness fell we headed back through the swamp to the visitor center.
photos by Tim Rodgers
It was too cloudy to see the full moon, but as we learned on this trip, we often didn’t get to see what we expected see, but what we were granted to see was more than enough to fill us with gratitude.
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.
~ Wendell Berry
(The Unforeseen Wilderness)
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(Thoughts from Earth)
Should at that moment the full moon
Step forth upon the hill,
And memories hard to bear at noon,
By moonlight harder still,
Form in the shadows of the trees, –
Things that you could not spare
And live, or so you thought, yet these
All gone, and you still there,
A man no longer what he was,
Not yet the thing he planned…
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
(Wine from These Grapes)
Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Circles)
Some adopt a rigid system that answers all possible questions and so you don’t have to think beyond its systems. The other response is much more seemingly fragile but much more expansive, because it doesn’t lay down a rigid framework. It allows you to move within the mystery of it. And that seems to be flowering right now. I think people are more and more interested in embracing that because they’ve been through everything else. It is a willingness to embrace mystery, a willingness to embrace not knowing, allowing that intuitive awareness to speak.
~ Paul John Roach
(The Translucent Revolution)
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine
~ Emily Saliers
♫ (Closer to Fine) ♫
Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
~ Wisława Szymborska
(Poems New & Collected)
Gain knowledge, brothers! Think and read,
And to your neighbors’ gifts pay heed,
Yet do not thus neglect your own.
Sadly I weep when I recall
The unforgotten deeds of all
Our ancestors: their toilsome deeds!
Could I forget their pangs and needs,
I, as my price, would then suppress
Half of my own life’s happiness…
~ Taras Shevchenko
(My Friendly Epistle)
A second beautiful gift of art from the delightful Val Erde! Her first gift, you may remember, was “Do the Funky Duck.” Decided to post “Dreamer” while I wait for Fran to return home from work. Tim and Dan are out doing errands – even errands are fun when your brother is there to talk with! 🙂 Tonight Fran and I will firm up our plans for the weekend, including seeing the African Cats movie. 🙂 I hope you will all enjoy Val’s beautiful painting as much as I am!!
We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb is taken off from our passions, and our imagination wanders at will. When awake, we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams, when we are off our guard they return securely and unbidden.
~ William Hazlitt
(Table Talk)