(In the children’s garden at the Cleveland Botanical Garden on a rainy day.)
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.
~ George Bernard Shaw
Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
~ William Jennings Bryan
To be simple means to make a choice about what’s important, and let go of all the rest. When we are able to do this, our vision expands, our heads clear, and we can better see the details of our lives in all their incredible wonder and beauty.
~ John Daido Loori
Take a rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.
~ Ovid
To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands.
~ Anne-Sophie Swetchine (1869)
I have ideas and I’m gathering flowers but I’m not quite ready to weave them into garlands just yet.
(Canyon Loop Trail near Boulder, Colorado.)
And we: spectators, always, everywhere, looking at everything, and never from! Who’s turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we always have the look of someone going away? Just as a person on the last hill showing him or her the whole valley one last time, turns, and stops, and lingers — so we live, and are forever leaving.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Love is not to be cultivated. Love cannot be divided into divine and physical; it is only love — not that you love many or the one. That again is an absurd question to ask: ‘Do you love all?’ You know, a flower that has perfume is not concerned who comes to smell it, or who turns his back upon it. So is love. Love is not a memory. Love is not a thing of the mind or the intellect. But it comes into being naturally as compassion, when this whole problem of existence — as fear, greed, envy, depair, hope — has been understood and resolved.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
Mystery is not the denial of reason but its honest confirmation: reason, indeed, leads inevitably to mystery: mystery and reality are the two halves of the same sphere.
~ Walt Whitman
(Waterfall and orchids.)
Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.
~ Lao Tzu
The more zigzag the way, the deeper the scenery. The winding path approaches the secluded and peaceful place.
~ Huang Binhong
Bountiful Healing 