Hoping for the best in the New Year

 

"We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say."

from Ask Me by William Stafford

“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond.” 

from M-Train
by Patti Smith

New Year's Day 2009

“I’m off balance, not sure what’s wrong. —You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.” 


from M-Train
by Patti Smith

How do you know that the pilgrim track 

Along the belting zodiac 

Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds 

Is traced by now to the Fishes’ bounds 

And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud 

Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud, 

And never as yet a tinct of spring 

Has shown in the Earth’s apparelling; 

 O vespering bird, how do you know, 

 How do you know?

from The Year's Awakening

by Thomas Hardy

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

"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

"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

                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

 

"I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war,

plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors,

comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities

besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters

and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times

afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies,

shipwrecks, piracies and sea-fights; peace, leagues,
stratagems, and fresh alarms.

A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions,

lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily
brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, corantoes,

stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes,

opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion,...

Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments,

jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels,

sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons,

cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals,

burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical,

then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers

created, tomorrow of some great men deposed, and then again

of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned;

one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns

bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs,

another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps...."

 

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy 1652

 

 

"when the storm rages and the shipwreck of the the

state threatens, we can do nothing more worthy than to

sink the anchor of our peaceful studies into the ground

of eternity."

 

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)