Buck......................

 

      All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the camp.  Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away from the lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was dead.  It left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void which ached and ached, and which food could not fill.  At times, when he paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself—a pride greater than any he had yet experienced.  He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang.  He sniffed the bodies curiously.  They had died so easily.  It was harder to kill a husky dog than them.  They were not match at all, were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs.  Thenceforward he would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their hands their arrows, spears, and clubs.

-Jack London, The Call of the Wild

Out walking...................

 

My Sweetie and I ventured out to the greater Toboso region this morning and walked five +/- miles on the Black Hand Gorge trail.  Hard to imagine a prettier walk.

The Licking River

the "deep cut", created in the 1850s.  Believe it or
not, but trains used to run here 175 years ago.

the site of the "black hand", destroyed during the
canal construction days.  Above the laid up stone, 
traces of the canal tow path still exist

further proof, as if we needed any, that God loves life

Not quite true for us...................

 

.........................the critters beat us to them:

We ate our first tomato and cucumber from the garden today. The garden is a good one this year but I made the mistake of planting too closely.

the tidal wave of being..............

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

-Jack London, The Call of the Wild

atmosphere...................

 

Claude Monet      +/-1863    Sunset over the Sea 

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the air and the light which vary continually. For me, it is only the, surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.

-Claude Monet

a wildly spasmodic blog.................

 

..........................ponders invisible wounds.

a dispensable piece..............

 

     Two things are unassailably and irreconcilably true on such a day: perceived with clear eyes, with eyes naked of preconception, reality as a whole is immaculate, is perfect, is pure, that even though three stone-fenced fields away a fox is plundering a wren's nest and is ravenously killing and devouring the still bald chicks, they themselves, every time their mother returns with her mouth full of death, seeming to be little more than luridly shrieking voracities for insects and grubs.

     To survive at all on such a day I'd have to forgo being a self: where normally I would say "I see," now in self-abeyance I would say "seeing is".

     On such a day it is good to know and still better it is to act on the knowledge that the subjective-objective divide is a dispensable piece of mental machinery, the mechanism of our alienation, turning us into spectators.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

two ways....................

 

This I believed: there are two ways we could have gone, the way of the Titan, Prometheus, or the way of the dolphin.  In the Promethean way we shape nature to suit us, in the way of the dolphin we let nature shape us to suit it.  Everywhere there is evidence that we have chosen wrongly.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

All my life.....................

 

On the first night of the millennium, remnants of the tremendous blizzard that tore through northern France the day after Christmas claimed the Pyrénées and tumbled down the mountainsides, chilling the village in which I live.  the wind that followed was thin and bitter—nothing like the full-bodied storms of my native region—and for the first time since I retired here a year ago I wanted a dog at the end of the bed to warm my feet.

     I packed a sandwich in the pocket of my hunting jacket the next morning and followed a game trail a thousand meters up the steep slope behind my house until I reached the meadow that saddles the snow-capped peaks closest to the village.  There I witnessed a spectacle long since disappeared in Normandy: a pair of golden eagles soaring, long wings cupping and releasing the wind, yellow talons tangling in midair like old men shaking hands.  Icy clouds sailed past the raptors in shreds.  I smoked and watched and flapped my arms and closed my eyes.  All my life I've wanted to fly and for an hour that morning I was the monarch of the sky.  When I looked through the binoculars Vincent has given me for Christmas I saw sheep in the valley, sunlight fanning across the mountain slopes, and the silhouettes of eagles dancing.

-Guy de la Valdène, Red Stag

It happens every......................

 

..................................almost-Spring:

an instructed mind...............

 

It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.

-Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Scenes from the trail.................

 

Reflections.................

 

even more red rocks.............

 

What us Ohioans appreciate most about taking pictures of the red rocks in Sedona is the startling blue sky.  Hard to come by in Ohio in January and February.

More red rocks

counsel.........................

     My soul preached to me and said, "Do not be delighted because of praise, and do not be distressed because of blame."

     Ere my soul counselled me, I doubted the worth of my work.

     Now I realize that the trees blossom in Spring and bear fruit in Summer without seeking praise; and they drop their leaves in Autumn and become naked in Winter without fearing blame.

Kahlil Gibran, Thoughts and Mediations

 

El Fuego......................

   

WAIT FOR IT! Time Lapse Video from Twilight to Sunrise. 1 hour in 22 seconds, 6:20 am to 7:20 am. 23° F, feels like 16° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.

   I had always loved sunrise: was always renewed in spirit.  For all my life I'd felt cheated if I'd ever slept through dawn.  The primeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plan had raised my childhood's goose pimples long before I understood why, and it had long seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.

-Dick Francis, as excerpted from Wild Horses

can't help but be....................

 

Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home.

     This strange, multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore—where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere—is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling.  About the stuff of which we ourselves are made.  We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can't help but be: a part of our world.

Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

caught in honey....................

We seem to be like flies caught in honey.  Because life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated.  We love it and hate it at the same time.  We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them.  The conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is between ourselves and ourselves.  For intractable nature is both around and within us.  The exasperating "life" which is at once loveable and perishable, pleasant and painful, a blessing and a curse, is also the life or our own bodies.

-Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

 

a universal sympathy..............

 

Years ago, living as I then was in Connemara, I moved house.  It was all of five or six weeks later that I had reason to open a cupboard in the kitchen.  On a shelf of it were some potatoes that the previous occupant had left behind.  Drawing only upon their own energies, these tubers had sprouted so naturally and so self-sacrificially as it were that now they were withered and shriveled, and cut off as they were from soil and sun, the sprouts were long and ghostly, almost transparent.

     Desperately, they needed inhumation.

     Desperately also, does modern humanity need to find ways, ritual ways, of living and expressing its affinity with nature.  With Stoics, I believe that there is a sumpatheia ton hollon, a universal sympathy, that runs through all things, that connects all things to all things, and it would I believe be good for all things, including ourselves, if we lived from that sympathy.

      In this we might need a little of what Karl Marx was pleased to call the idiocy of rural life.

-John Moriarty, Dreamtime