hands

I can't work the fields of Abraham

And turn my head away

I'm not a stranger 
In the hands of the maker
--Daniel Lanois

guided by wire

...singing my life back to me.

shadow painting

intimate

...I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things ... one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must try to know deeper, better and more.  That leads to God; that leads to unwavering faith.
--Vincent van Gogh

pond IV

éphémère...

pale sun

...treepond and echo

soul

...there is one great truth on this planet: whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe.

--Paulo Coelho,  The Alchemist

Desires:

green tunnels

persistent north/northwest wind

warm late day sun 

collision of light and water and the sparkle dance of light on wavelets

snails in their shells -- more snails than I ever imagined

ruts

I believe that ruts are under appreciated.  One of the highlights of growing up farm girl was the captivating charms of ruts.  Admittedly the process of making the ruts, not so charming -- large tractors or trucks, thick wet muck, and then chains and ropes and more trucks and tractors, tactical calculation, collaboration, cursing.

But I love the negative space left by a tractor tire -- and the way it fills with water -- and finding tadpoles in the water -- and as the water evaporates, the leathery hardness just before the earth peels into thin curling sheets that shatter when I try to pick them up.

barbaric

I don't want to lose this barbaric feeling.

--Will 

*

I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

--Walt Whitman

Today we are wild and loose in the world.  We are muddy and wet, with dirt on our knees and under our fingernails, and there are bugs in our hair.  We smell like the outside -- an earthy perfume of the combined breath of black earth, northern wind, new leaves, and creek rocks slick with moss.  We explore, study, interpret, dream, and make plans ... We are gypsies carried by currents of air and water and all of the songs of our own making.  

*photo credit for caterpillars:  Will 

love ethic

In this society, there is no powerful discourse on love emerging either from politically progressive radicals or from the Left.  The absence of a sustained focus of love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and on overdetermined emphasis on material concerns.  Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed.  As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination.  

--bell hooks

light

...from this morning.  A soft place before the day began that is a pleasure to revisit.  

I like the idea of time travel and sometimes when I think about it, I can almost figure out how it works --even if I can't manage to explain it.  Music and photographs, food and smells too, are the closest things I can name that approximate it.   Experience and emotion wrapped in a moment, but the moment passes.  The recovery of an artifact is like opening a package sent from the past, only the pleasure is enhanced by nostalgia for that moment and all the other experiences between it and the now.  Burgundy in oak.

les ailes du temps

...parce qu'il est plus poetique en français.

Je regarde leur tremblement sous les ailes du temps qui passe. Elles ont une manière rayonnante d'être sans défense, et j'écris cette phrase sous leur dictée : "Ce qui fait événement, c'est ce qui est vivant, et ce qui est vivant, c'est ce qui ne se protège pas de sa perte.
--Christian Bobin

Merci MAel.