More from this morning @ DK @ Daybreak. 4:50 to 5: 40 am. June 27, 2021. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
Spring Night
March 28, 2021 by 21 Comments
The few minutes of a Spring night are worth ten thousand pieces of gold.
The perfume of the flowers is so pure.
The shadows of the moon are so black.
— Su Dongpo, (1037-1101) from “Spring Night” in “One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.” Trans. Kenneth Rexroth.
Notes:
- Photo by DK: Mar 28 2020. 2:34 A.M. 46° F. Backyard.
- Poem: Thank you Beth @ (via Alive on All Channels)
Sunday Morning
January 19, 2020 by 15 Comments
My mother’s need for order has nothing to do with the chaos of a life with too little space and too little money and almost no chance to make something beautiful of it all. The chance to create loveliness is always waiting just past the door of our matchbox rental. She never prepares for gardening—no special gloves, no rubber garden clogs, no stiff canvas apron with pockets for tools. No tools, most of the time. She steps out of the house—or the car, setting her bags down before she even makes it to the door—and puts her hands in the soil, tugging out the green things that don’t belong among the green things that do. Now another bare square of ground appears, and there is room for marigold seeds, the ones she saved when last year’s ruffled yellow blooms turned brown and dried to fragile likenesses of themselves. The light bill might be under the covers at the foot of her bed, the unsigned report card somewhere in the mess of papers on the mantel, but she can always put her hands on last year’s seeds. And later, in the summer, the very ground she walks on will be covered in gold.
~ Margaret Renkl, from “My Mother Pulls Weeds, Birmingham, 1978,” Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss
Photo: Cindy Garber Iverson
If it rains, carry an umbrella, if it’s cold, wear a jacket.
May 14, 2019 by 31 Comments
As soon as the snow melts the grass begins to grow. Even
though the daytime high is barely above freezing, even
though May is very like November, marsh marigolds bloom
in the swamp and the popple trees produce a faint green
that hangs under the low clouds like a haze over the valley.
This is the way the saints live, no complaints, no suspicion,
no surprise. If it rains, carry an umbrella, if it’s cold, wear
a jacket.
~ Louis Jenkins, “Saints” from “Just Above Water: Prose Poems“
Notes: Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Marsh Marigold in Swamp via nature preserves
Saturday Morning
May 4, 2019 by 27 Comments
I am going to try to pay attention to the spring.
I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees.
I am going to close my eyes and listen.
~ Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Notes: Quote via risky wiver. Photo: By our very own Kiki! Taken on 10 years ago on this day on May 4th, 2009. What a coincidence!
Miracle. All of it.
April 7, 2019 by 34 Comments
Spring has finally arrived, and it makes me smile every time I step outside. New green leaves are pushing themselves into the sunlight as plants build the solar panels that will fuel them throughout the year. The first spring flowers are already in bloom, and a bright showcase of cheerful rainbow color is rapidly replacing the gray-brown palette of late winter.
I love the constant small surprises as new flowers appear. But each new sighting makes me wish for a superpower: the sort of expanded vision that could show me all the colors these flowers have to offer. Human beings can see some of them, and birds and bees can see a little more. But the potential range of invisible colors is mind-boggling, and science is only just starting to get a grip on it.
Our color vision is neatly summed up in our perception of a rainbow, sweeping from red, the longest wavelength of light that our eyes can detect, to violet, the shortest. But we can’t detect each shade individually; in order to make sense of this continuous spectrum of colors, we use a clever shortcut. Our eyes have three types of cone cell that respond to different colors—red, green and blue. Our brain figures out how much of the light that we see falls into each category, and it recombines that information to construct the myriad colors that we register. It is both beautifully efficient and frustratingly crude…
~Helen Czerski, from Colors That Only Bees and Birds Can See
Notes:
- Photo: Spring Flowers by Paul.
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
I have found myself thinking of summer fields
May 14, 2017 by 21 Comments
I have found myself thinking of summer fields. Fields full of flowers— poppies or lupines. Or, here, fields where the roses hook into the dunes, and their increase is manyfold. All summer they are red and pink and white tents of softness and nectar, which wafts and hangs everywhere— a sweetness so palpable and excessive that, before it, I’m struck, I’m taken, I’m conquered; I’m washed into it, as though it was a river, full of dreaming and idleness— I drop to the sand, I can’t move; I am restless no more; I am replete, supine, finished, filled to the last edges with an immobilizing happiness.
~ Mary Oliver, from “Owls” in Upstream: Selected Essays
Photo: Bart Ceuppens (Belgium) with Poppies (via drxgonfly)
Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the middle of the night and sing?
October 13, 2016 by 15 Comments
One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people – a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes. Hello Tom, hello Andy. Hello Archibald Violet, and Clarissa Bluebell. Hello Lillian Willow, and Noah, the oak tree I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last thirty years. And in reply its thousands of leaves tremble! What a life is ours! Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the
middle of the night and
sing?
~ Mary Oliver, from “Upstream” in Upstream, Selected Essays
Notes:
- Photo: Mary Pavlova (via Hidden Sanctuary)
- Related Posts: Mary Oliver
Death Valley Bloom Explosion
February 28, 2016 by 21 Comments
“About once every 10 years, Death Valley is coated in millions of flowers, becoming the valley of life. The conditions have to be just so, in order for the flowers to bloom, including the perfect amount of rain combined with conducive temperatures. About 20 species of wildflowers are currently blooming in the desert, northeast of Los Angeles. Those interested in seeing the super bloom should go sooner rather than later because if temperatures reach above 100 degrees, the flowers will wilt and die. Strong winds can also dry out the flowers, nipping the super bloom in the bud. If the temperatures stay under 100 and no strong winds come, the flowers will likely stick around until April.
The last time the blooms exploded on the desert floor was in 2005.”
Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem “To Make a Prairie” (1755):
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Video & quote source: Grindtv
Few lines and blocks of color carry an explosive and mystical power
December 21, 2015 by 17 Comments
It is interesting to observe that what (Georgia) O’Keeffe wanted to achieve was achieved from the start, and has hardly changed— the reducing of a landscape, a flower, or whatever to essence, the isolation of a powerful image which she then enlarges. Sometimes the effect is merely pictorial, and becomes banal and even sentimental (the famous skull with roses), but at her best a very few lines and blocks of color carry an explosive and mystical power. These are paintings that expand the mind, and I imagine living with one very happily.
~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Source: The Red List: Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Canna, 1924
May first. Just too much.
May 1, 2015 by 14 Comments
May first, there was too much green and pink and yellow. There was no escaping the loveliness, the delicacy. Beauty assaulted me on every front— forsythia, like a breaking wave, no, a tsunami of yellow; the old magnolia exploding into pink and white, like grenades; blue sky— there was no escape from all this beauty, I was being force-fed a spring morning, even the oxygen was divine…
~ Abigail Thomas, What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir
Photograph: Precious Things (Johannes Linder by André Hemstedt)
Skip Spring Break? Far better to escape to spring.
March 23, 2014 by 12 Comments
George Ball is the chairman of the Burpee Seed Company and a former president of the American Horticultural Society. Here’s the intro to his article titled: “Spring Is Here. Why Take a Break?”
As Thursday is the first day of spring, it seems timely to ask, why does anyone go on spring vacation? It seems odd to fly to a tropical destination at the very moment that one of the great astonishments of life on Earth is taking place right at home. When friends tell me their spring-vacation plans, they mention the word “escape.” Really? You want to escape from spring? That’s like fleeing paradise. Far better to escape to spring.
You cannot access the season’s magic on your laptop or smartphone; you can’t watch it on TV or catch it on your radio or simply read about it. If you wish to apprehend spring in its ineffable splendor, you have to show up in person, with every one of your senses engaged, and personally participate in this annual miracle.
The media world in which we dwell offers us a shared spectacle of limitless images, constant chatter, endless noise, infinite information and mountains of data—at once a stimulant and a narcotic. What’s lacking in this man-made media galaxy is everything that matters: beauty, love, magic, mystery, grandeur, rapture, the miraculous. Not to forget poetry, delicacy, refinement, purity, splendor, intimacy, innocence, fulfillment, inspiration. And then there’s nuance, drama, poignancy, integrity, harmony.
Where will you find these? On your smartphone? Non. On your tropical vacation? Unlikely. Discover the magnitude, mystery and wonder of life at home, working in your garden, in springtime….
It gets better. Read the rest here: Spring Is Here. Why Take a Break?
Image Source: My Favourite Web Photos
Sing Robin, Sing
March 16, 2014 by 28 Comments
I wonder if the sap is stirring yet,
If wintry birds are dreaming of a mate,
If frozen snowdrops feel as yet the sun
And crocus fires are kindling one by one:
Sing robin, sing:
I still am sore in doubt concerning Spring.
~ Christina Rossetti
Credits: Photograph of a European Robin by Leonard Davis. Poem via Gardendigest.com. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children’s poems.
John Nolan, Mountain View
January 30, 2014 by 16 Comments
“Birth date 1958. Place of birth. Dublin, Ireland. I work from a studio in Dublin City. I have been painting from an early age due to the encouragement I received from my father who was an artist. I explore colour. Colour is the subject of my paintings. I paint in the abstract form and the modern stylised form. I am influenced by many forms of art and artists. Education: I started painting and never stopped.”
See more fine art by John Nolan here. See John Nolan’s website here.
You can never have too much sky
January 17, 2014 by 23 Comments
You can never have too much sky.
You can fall asleep
and wake up drunk on sky,
and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.
Here there is too much sadness
and not enough sky.
Butterflies are too few
and so are flowers
and most things that are beautiful.
Still we take what we can get and make the best of it.
— Sandra Cisneros
Credits: Image – A Poet Reflects. Poem: Stalwart Reader from The House on Mango Street
Really?
January 5, 2014 by 43 Comments
Tatsuo Horiuchi, a 73-year-old Japanese man, created this art.
I said: “Nice.”
Then I checked out some of his other creations.
Then I said: “Very Nice.”
Then I learned how he did it.
Then I said: “Really?”
Then I went back and looked more closely.
Then I scratched my head and said: “Amazing.”
See story here on MyModernMet.
Related Post: Look closely at this. (I mean really closely)
4:14 am. And Inspired.
April 10, 2013 by 11 Comments
Good Wednesday morning. Here are my selections of the inspiring posts of the week:
Anneli @ Words From Anneli kicks us off with her post La Conner Tulip Festival. That’s her shot above. Check out more great shots at this link.
Luggage Lady with her post titled We Can Never Go Back: “…Every summer growing up, my family journeyed from Chicago suburbia to my grandparent’s farm in southern Illinois. They called us “city kids,” and we couldn’t wait to indulge in the expansive freedoms of country life…Woven into the daily demands were simple pleasures, like piling onto the front porch swing at the end of the long day. Grandparents first, followed by a layer of grandchildren, and topped off with the latest litter of purring kittens. The swing’s chains creaked in time with chirping male crickets claiming their conquests. An occasional freight train rumbled down nearby tracks as we kids marveled at stars not visible back home. Sometimes, a puff of cool air bored through the wall of humidity, teasing us with anticipation of a brewing storm…”
Kurt @ Cultural Offering. with his post titled Friendly Advice where he shares excerpts from a Peggy Noonan interview with the “founder” of Singapore: U.S. is still ‘a frontier society.’ ‘The American culture . . . is that we start from scratch and beat you.’ They would settle an empty area, call it a town, and say, ‘You be the sheriff, I am the judge, you are the policeman, and you are the banker, let us start.” And then Kurt shares a wonderful story about Margaret Thatcher leading from the front among a group of men. This post is titled: Margaret Thatcher R.I.P.
Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.
September 10, 2012 by 24 Comments
“At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by our parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by that time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown. The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you’re brown, you’ll find that you’re blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means, Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.”
Sources: Image – 1000drawings via society6.com. Quote: gene-how
Burn down that house…
May 31, 2012 by 8 Comments
“There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”
– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Notes:
- Quote Source: Thank you crashinglybeautiful (via schadenfreudist)
- Image & Source: High Speed Photos of Exploding Flowers via Booooom
Live & Learn 