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saturn rising: Mary Oliver, "A Settlement"

Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

* * *
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.

(Thank you, saturnrising & yesyes)

track Dark End of the Street
artist Ry Cooder
album Boomer's Story

Ry Cooder: Dark End of the Street, fromBoomer’s Story (Thank you, i12bent & musical-moodswings)

(Source: evilgirl333x2)

Jan Saudek. Courtesy of Le Clown Lyrique.

Jan Saudek. Courtesy of Le Clown Lyrique.

Robert Häusser, Kultstätte, 2000. Amazing, thank you, yama-bato.

Robert Häusser, Kultstätte, 2000. Amazing, thank you, yama-bato.

Caspar David Friedrich, Evening Landscape with Two Men Oil on canvas, 1830-1835. From liquidnight.

Caspar David Friedrich, Evening Landscape with Two Men Oil on canvas, 1830-1835. From liquidnight.

let go

Let go
this ‘everywhere’ and this ‘everything’ in exchange for this
‘nowhere’ and this ‘nothing.’
Never mind if you cannot fathom this nothing,
for I love it surely so much better.

It is so worthwhile in
itself that no thinking about it will do it justice.
One can feel this nothing more easily than see it,
for it is completely dark and hidden to
those who have only just begun to look at it.

Yet to speak more
accurately, it is overwhelming spiritual light that blinds the soul that is experiencing it,
rather than actual darkness or the absence of physical light.

Who is it then, who is it then, who is calling it ‘nothing’?
Our outer self, to be sure, not our inner.
Our inner self calls it ‘All’,
for through it he is learning the secret of all things,
physical and spiritual alike,
without having to consider every single one separately
on it’s own.

~ The Cloud of Unknowing with thanks to The Beauty We Love and Bill Lindley

Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia, 1936. From Weimar.

Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia, 1936. From Weimar.

Franco Fontana, Landscape, 1978 by Franco Fontana. Thank you, firsttimeuser.

Franco Fontana, Landscape, 1978 by Franco Fontana. Thank you, firsttimeuser.

“Broken and broken
again on the sea,
the moon so easily mends”

—Chosu

always been

Birth, old age,
Sickness, and death:
From the beginning,
This is the way
Things have always been.
Any thought
Of release from this life
Will wrap you only more tightly
In its snares.
The sleeping person
Looks for a Buddha,
The troubled person
Turns toward meditation.
But the one who knows
That there’s nothing to seek
Knows too that there’s nothing to say.
She keeps her mouth closed.

~ Ly Ngoc Kieu
translated by Thich Nhat Hanh and Jane Hirshfield

The earliest known woman writer of Vietnam,
she was a Zen Buddhist nun in the eleventh century. 
Born a princess, she became a nun after being widowed.

Thank you, Dean @ The Beauty We Love