Friday, February 20, 2015

"Which of the horses
we passed yesterday whinnied
all night in my dreams?
I want that one."

from Stories from Kansas
 
 

More photos from our trip in Oct. these are our friends horses.
 All the quotes are from William Stafford's
Stories That Could Be True New and Collected Poems.




 


"While the earth breaks the soft horizon
eastward, we study how to deserve
what has already been given us."

from Love in the County



"The wild keeps telling us something 
we want to pass on to the world:
Even far things are real.

from Whispered into the Ground


Friday, February 13, 2015



“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, 

that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.” 

from My Antonia

 by Willa Cather



My latest photos are from a trip to visit our friends that live in Southern 
Alberta. They live in the true prairie in an area fringed by the nearby 
Drumheller Badlands. And while I love the Aspen Parkland where we 
have built our cabin among the sloughs and the poplars. I will always
 love watching the movement of the clouds, the wind, the shadows,  
the seasons and the migrations that move across the endless sky and 
the vast fields of the open prairie. These photo stem from 
a trip to explore a road cut on the edge of the Badlands.








I am bound to the earth by a web of stories,
just as I am bound to the creation by the very substance and
rhythms of my flesh. By keeping the stories fresh, I keep the places
themselves alive in my imagination. Living in me, borne in mind, these
places make up the landscape on which I stand with familiiarity and 
pleasure, the landscape over which I walk even when my feet are still."

 from Telling the Holy
    by Scott Russell Saunders









Sunday, February 8, 2015




"His beak could open a bottle,
and his eyes - when he lifts their soft lids -
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder -
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.

Never mind that he eats only
the black-smocked crickets,
and the dragonflies if they happen
to be out late over the ponds, and of course
the occasional festal mouse.
Never mind that he is only a memo
from the offices of fear -"


from The Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard
Mary Oliver




Not so little Great Horned Owl
Hand Hills Alberta Oct 2014

"Where it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything, 
I would have to be lonely forever.”

from Lights on a Ground of Darkness
Ted Kooser

Thanks Tim

Saturday, February 7, 2015

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor
 towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

from Burnt Norton
             T.S. Eliot


somewhere in the Hand Hills area, Southern Alberta