"On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea 

extended beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of imagination followed 

them as they curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I 

was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and 

with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that 

little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived 

in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity 

of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, 

its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing

 hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars.

If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here 

and there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man's 

blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant 

tremor, or part of a universal movement!"

from The Star Maker (1937)

Olaf Stapledon

Well I have been very lazy lately, I have not even finished 

editing my summer photos from the cabin.

I will try top be a little more active this year

although I am not much for resolutions. 

In the early morning I like to walk down the grid road 

that passes our lane to a small slough where the road curves. 

It was on one of these walks that I met this Waxwing. I am 

always amazed at how delicately coloured they are when 

I see one up  close. 

All the best in 2015

" 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