Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do.
~ Annie Dillard, Seeing. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (HarperCollins. 2009)
Credits: Lamp: ronbeckdesigns – “Perch Light :: Umut Yamac” via Your Eyes Blaze Out
This was the PERFECT read (albeit out of order) after the NPR short..
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Smiling. I figured you would read them in the right order!
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That’s me – working backwards all the time. Sometimes I get it right! 😉
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Laughing…WMS. I thought the EXACT same thing.
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Yin and Yang
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Smiling. Learnt some of this the hard way – still enjoyable.
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I bet you have…
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I love that Nature is so sly. She wants us to pay attention.
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She certainly does. Your comment reminds me of:
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Yikes! That’s just horrifying!
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Laughing.
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That reminds me of a story one of my teachers told us in Catholic school. There is a hymn that goes “…eat His body, drink His blood”, in reference to the body and blood of Christ. When the Catholic missionaries would try to convert cannibals, the cannibals couldn’t understand why it was o.k. to eat Christ when it wasn’t o.k. to eat Mr. Smith down the road. Well, duh!
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Smiling….great story Carolann.
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all about vision as your theme for you today, dk. here and gone and here once again.
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Yes Beth. Yet is was an unconscious focus on vision making me wonder what was going on deep in the mind to pull me to the theme.
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WHERE do you get these pictures? I feel like a puppy dog following you around, picking up more blog ideas!
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Awwwwwww…. 🙂
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