Saturday, January 28, 2017

Thursday, January 26, 2017



"Time and space - time to be alone, space
to move about - these may well become the
great scarcities of tomorrow."

from Autumn Across America, 1956
by Edwin way Teale

Saturday, January 21, 2017


Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. 
I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

Anais Nin

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Venice was very much a de Chirico moment, one of our favourite 
artists, with it's statues and plazas and vistas glimpsed between
lovely buildings coloured in muted earth tones.


"Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments 
on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence 
and distraction of common men."


by Giorgio de Chirico

Monday, January 16, 2017

Canadian Poetry Gift

"With sealed eyes, still bosom,
And folded feet I fare
To that country under dream
Where Eternity and Time
Are two sides of a drum."

from THE TWO SIDES OF A DRUM
BY A.J.M. SMITH (News of the Phoenix) 1943

Last week I received a gift of some beautiful old
Canadian poetry books, many inscribed by the authors, as well
 as a lovely collection of books by and about Dylan Thomas.

What a special and generous gift.


"Now lift your eyes
To see the nightly patterned skies
How did they come there
The Hunter and his Dog, The Virgin and the Bear?"

from Ideas of Order
by Jay MacPherson (Nineteen Poems) June 1952


"There is a mountain  everyone must climb,
Different for all and yet it is the same.
We start to climb before we have a name,
And nick the summit in our nick of time."

from The Mountain
by Robert Finch (The Strength of the Hills) 1948

Sunday, January 8, 2017



"Time is measured in change
whether by the movement of
instruments or in the appearance
of our bodies. We often feel the 
need to escape to places where time 
will not follow. To the solitude of a 
cathedral or an untouched forest
floor. Here, as we contemplate the
scope of human existence, we
cannot forget that even cathedrals
crumble and forests die. The 
computations of astronomers bear
witness to the gradual alteration 
of the constellations as the stars
move across the firmament. The 
works of nature and man disintegrate
and are gone,  and nothing endures
on the vault of the sky of the surface
of the sea. Only the shapes of the
land seem eternal."

from A Vanished World, T
he Dinosaurs of Western Canada

by Dale A. Russell



Saturday, January 7, 2017



"I obtain great satisfaction out of using my intellect. "

Temple Grandin

Friday, January 6, 2017

Beyond The Fields We Know

From my favourite blog, one I have followed many years.

http://www.beyondthefieldsweknow.org/2017/01/the-winter-solstice-came-and-went-and.html

Resolutions this year??? No resolutions scrawled on paper 
or etched in stone, only the same old work in progress 
- trying to be fully present and paying attention, cultivating 
an intimate connection with my native woods and fields, 
getting out of my own way and letting the camera see 
what it will see, just breathing, in and out, in and out.  
In the words of Surya Das, 


"There's nothing to do but remain in the view".





stripped bare,
 in the cold the trees let fall ~

a new beauty.

Guy

Sunday, January 1, 2017

"Within the last few decades, since the complete triumph
of industrialization, the image of our earth's surface has been
entirely altered and rearranged; every city and landscape in
the world has suffered monstrous change and a corresponding
revolution has swept the souls and minds of men.
In the years since the outbreak of the world war this
development has been so rapid that one can without
exaggeration announce the death and destruction 
of that culture in which we older people were educated
as children and which seemed to us at that time eternal
and immutable."

 from Our Age's Yearning for a Philosophy of Life 
1926-1927 by Hermann Hesse


Hermann Hesse, My Belief, Essays on Life and Art


I have dipped into this book hundreds of times, simply to 
read, not necessarily taking much from it, often not 
finishing the essay. So why have I placed this book by my
bed for so many years? In these essays Hesse demonstrates
that there is a life of the mind. That someone read and 
thought about our intellectual history, our spirituality, our 
morality. He mulled over what he has read and heard and 
experienced in an attempt to understand his place in the
world and that of his fellows. And I suspect this is a 
worthwhile pursuit, an subject that everyone would 
be better off reflecting on and working through.

" Over there the pale snow lay in a different fashion
than on my roof, over there the beech forest and the

black pine trees were indescribably beautiful and 
reserved in a way I never saw in my neighborhood;
perhaps God Himself walked over there along the 
slopes, and whoever met Him there could touch Him
and speak to Him and look closely into His eyes."


from At Year's End 1904
              by Hermann Hesse