What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.
~ Isaac Bashevis Singer
Fire
(Sunlight on snow and hoar frost.)
It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.
~ Rachel Carson
More pink here, if you please.
~ Franz Liszt
I’ve been working with some colorful photos for the past few days, trying to brighten and warm things up a little during these cold winter months.
If this photo looks familiar to you, there’s a good reason for that. It’s a repeat. But I like the fiery pink so much that I decided it was worth another look at it. It’s been tweaked a little since I last posted it, but not enough to make a big difference. Instead, just enough to bring out the pink a little more.
Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.
~ Meister Eckhart
I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.
~ Rachel Carson
(A stream of sunlight. December 2009.)
There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden, or even your bathtub.
~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
(Sun catcher on a rainy day in December.)
Your body is precious. It is our vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.
~ Buddha
(American winterberry, a holly.)
Red ‘rings’ inwardly with a determined and powerful intensity. It glows in itself, maturely, and does not distribute its vigor aimlessly…
~ Vassily Kandinsky
(Afternoon sunlight hitting the wall.)
The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are the most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
~ Frederick Buechner
Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or in yonder seas; they are in your own backyard, if you but dig for them.
~ Russell H. Conwell
I think I’m going to forever associate sunflowers with my mother’s illness and death. Not in a bad way, but in a way I can’t fully explain just yet. Perhaps I’ll never be able to explain it completely other than to say that somehow sunflowers brought a measure of beauty, peace, light, and comfort into my life at a time when I most needed those things. Some of my sunflower photos even served as expressions of my feelings — feelings I couldn’t put into words — on my blogs.
I was going through my collection of sunflower pictures when I came across this one, in a possibly-rejects file (the “possibly-rejects” are those photos I couldn’t make a decision about in regards to saving or deleting). I don’t know why I didn’t like it at the time or why I suddenly see something in it now that I didn’t then, but I’m glad I saved it. It was, for me, worth another look.
Bountiful Healing 