brushstrokes

Thanks Rob for the view from your neck of the woods...

Nature is beautiful because it looks like art, and art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature.  

-- Immanuel Kant

same sky, same time ... different neck of the woods

whitman and the moth

Van Wyck Brooks tells us Whitman in old age

Sat by a pond in nothing but his hat,

Crowding his final notebooks page by page

With names of trees, birds, bugs and things like that.

 

The war could never break him, though he’d seen

Horrors in hospitals to chill the soul.

But now, preserved, the Union had turned mean:

Evangelizing greed was in control.

 

Good reason to despair, yet grief was purged

By tracing how creation reigned supreme.

A pupa cracked, a butterfly emerged:

America, still unfolding from its dream.

 

Sometimes he rose and waded in the pond,

Soothing his aching feet in the sweet mud.

A moth he knew, of which he had grown fond,

Perched on his hand as if to draw his blood.

 

But they were joined by what each couldn’t do,

The meeting point where great art comes to pass –

Whitman, who danced and sang but never flew,

The moth, which had not written Leaves of Grass,

 

Composed a picture of the interchange

Between the mind and all that it transcends

Yet must stay near. No, there was nothing strange

In how he put his hand out to make friends

 

With such a fragile creature, soft as dust.

Feeling the pond cool as the light grew dim,

He blessed new life, though it had only just

Arrived in time to see the end of him.

--Clive James

what to do

with a bit of found time in the morning?

a.  sleep later

b.  eat breakfast

c. get a head start on the day's business

d.  take the long way to work

I am loving the sunrise commute again -- so much that I stretched it out a bit.  The pale orange and plum smoke continued into this morning, and I communed with some cows and bothered some dogs by stopping in the middle of roads that you can stand in for long stretches of time before another car comes by.  

east, west

We move between these horizons, but our hearts go with those who traverse the great and holy distances beyond.

time change

It's always a little strange, the bi-annual practice of turning the clock forward or backward, as if we had some sort of control over time.  We try to keep it, to track it, fill it, slow it, but it has its own way.  The seasons pass in their order according to an ancient rhythm.  This order is a comfort in a way that a watch or an hourglass can never be.

The sun, now hanging lower in the sky -- makes long shadows and changes the color of everything it falls upon. Every sunset is a benediction -- a golden blessing cast over all within its reach.

harboring spirit

Word by word, I trudge closer, stumbling through the underbrush of sound and meaning...  As I understand the place of the noun in the Ojibwe mind, it is unprejudiced by gender distinctions.  That is some relief.  Yet there occurs something more mysterious.  Alive or Dead.  Each thing is either animate or inanimate, which would at first seem remarkably simple and sensible, for in the western mind the quality of aliveness or deadness seems easy to discern.  Not so.  For the Anishinaabeg, the quality of animation from within, or harboring spirit, is not limited to animals and plants.  Stones, asiniig, are animate, and kettles, akikoog, alive as well...

--Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

welcome to the cemetery of forgotten books

This is a place of mystery ... a sanctuary.  Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul.  The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.  Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens...  When a library disappears, or a book-shop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here.  In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting ... we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner.

--Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind