The structure of the landscape

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape.
Andrew Wyeth

I would rather have birds.

I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
Charles Lindbergh

Luisa and Thinker wish you a Merry Christmas!

At Christmas, all roads lead home.
Marjorie Holmes

subtle air.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing

Water remembers

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
Toni Morrison

Just once around the sun.

Vincent: A year is a long time.
Irene: Not so long. Just once around the sun.
from a movie Gattaca

World is a forest

The world's a forest, in which all lose their way; though by a different path each goes astray.
George Villiers

Light

There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

Ahead

There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C.S. Lewis

The thinness of existence

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence. You know with painful accuracy the provenance of everything you touch and the last time you touched it. The five little cushions on your sofa stay plumped and leaning at their jaunty angle for months at a time unless you theatrically mess them. The level of the salt in your shaker decreases at the same excruciating rate, day after day.
Zoe Heller

Love

God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.
Jacques Deval

Fall

How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?
Charles Wright

Poet's Obligation

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying 'How can I reach the sea?'
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of the sea-birds on the coast.


So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

Pablo Neruda

A true place

It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Herman Melville