Patti Smith, Jesse with Flower, 2003. Thank you, les-sources-du-nil.
I would like to house my spirit within my body, to nourish my virtue by mildness, and to travel in ether by becoming a void. But I cannot do it yet … And so, being unable to find peace within myself, I made use of the external surroundings to calm my spirit, and being unable to find delight within my heart, I borrowed a landscape to please it. Therefore, strange were my travels.
T’u Lung (T’u Ch’ihshui) translated by Lin Yutang, The Travels of Mingliaotse. Courtesy of Whiskey River.
Within light there is darkness,
But do not try to understand that darkness.
Within darkness there is light,
But do not look for that light.
Light and darkness are a pair,
Like the foot before and the foot behind in walking.
–Shih’tuo, a verse from the Sandokai
Photograph: George Seeley, Black Bowl, 1907
(Source: parabola-magazine)
Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.
Mary Oliver, Thirst. And the river flows…
A young couple peers over the edge of Hopi Point into the Grand Canyon, May 1955.
Photograph by Justin Locke, National Geographic
Thank you, natgeofound:
Arnold Genthe (German, 1869-1942). Autochrome. Thank you, arsvitaest.
A deer!—nibbling on the few green things
that grow in my strawy meadow.
Mine, we say here: my studio, my meadow, my road.
It is as it is. We were born
to possess it all and more. There’s no longer
a chance to change direction. So have one. Have a meadow,
Try it on—there are black-eyed Susans in your hair.
Have a deer. Have a deer fly—(I had two
of them yesterday. My stained tablet backs me up).
Have a swallow. Try to hold it in your throat
as it goes down beyond the pines of your forest.
But first feel its presence, try to catch
its essence. Before the words intrude.
—Joan Murray, from “Possession”
Art Credit Wolfgang Tillmans
from theparisreview.
Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau - Coastline II, 1908 (bofransson)
(via chasingtailfeathers)
As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth … the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
—Gary Snyder
(Source: apoetreflects, via the-night-picture-collector)
Paul Burty Haviland (1880-1950), The Japanese Lantern, 1912. Thank you, les-sources-du-nil.
