(Sun catcher on a rainy day in December.)
Your body is precious. It is our vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.
~ Buddha
In the moment
(Yesterday’s rainbow.)
There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
(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.
It is not by meticulous care in avoiding all contaminations that we can keep our [spiritual body] clean and give it grace, but by urging it to give vigorous expression to its inner life in the very midst of all the dust and heat and hurts.
~ Rabindranath Tagore
Tell me what you feel in your room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy.
~ Henri Frederic Amiel
(November moonrise.)
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
~ Jean Jacques Rousseau
We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision.
~ Author unknown
This is not my usual style, but I liked the light, colors and shapes in an otherwise blurry photo so I blurred and twisted them a bit.
The more we let each voice sing out with its own true tone, the richer will be the diversity of the chant in unison.
~ Angelus Silesius
Bountiful Healing 