"I find I am humming, softly, not to the music, but to something else, some place else. A place remembered."
from A River Runs Through It
I can also be found at all the words (poems) and in silence, humming softly (musing)...
My other site the far blue hills (gardens, nature) is awaiting my attention to photographs... naming, sorting, rearranging. Not abandoned, just taking a rest.
It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools.
~Wendell Berry
Source: The Gift of Good Land, from inwardoutward.org
(Source: inwardoutward.org)
“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”
-Mary Oliver, from Blue Pastures
(Source: goodreads.com)
Betty Adcock from Intervale
Dusk and snow this hour
in argument have settled
nothing. Light persists,
and darkness. If a star
shines now, that shine is
swallowed and given back
doubled, grounded bright.
The timid angels flailed
by passing children lift
in a whitening wind
toward night. What plays
beyond the window plays
as water might, all parts
making cold digress.
Beneath iced bush and eave,
the small banked fires of birds
at rest lend absences
to seeming absence. Truth
is, nothing at all is missing.
Wind hisses and one shadow
sways where a window’s lampglow
has added something. The rest
is dark and light together tolled
against the boundary-riven
houses. Against our lives,
the stunning wholeness of the world.
Posted at Beyond the Fields We Know
Thank you, growing-orbits:
The Kingdom
At times
the heart
stands back
and looks at the body,
looks at the mind,
as a lion
quietly looks
at the not-quite-itself,
not-quite-another,
moving of shadows and grass.
Wary, but with interest,
considers its kingdom.
Then seeing
all that will be,
heart once again enters —
enters hunger, enters sorrow,
enters finally losing it all.
To know, if nothing else,
what it once owned.— Jane Hirshfield
Courage is exhibited when someone strikes out into unfamiliar territory where few if any have yet gone, and helps pioneer a new way of working and serving. [They] blaze new trails despite what everyone else around them is doing, and whether or not others join, they do what they see is right, at whatever sacrifice. When someone lives originally and courageously, it inspires others to examine their own lives and actions and find within themselves the courage to follow their own original paths.
-Dave Smith from To Be of Use, The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work
For Lucy, who called them “ghost houses.”
Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.
Someone always traded
the lonely beauty
of hemlock and stony lakeshore
for survival,…
