The air was warm

Balmy
Breezy
Barefoot
Sipping
Swimming
Strolling

In the duff

Reflection

Only when the clamor of the outside world is silenced
will you be able to hear the deeper vibration.
Listen carefully.

- Sarah Ban Breathnach

Dewdrops

Red leaves and frostdrops
Diamonds on huckleberry
Angel tears or dew

Leave a trace

All I can do is leave a trace.
I can leave it on a piece of paper;
or on the ground,
but the best place to leave it
is in the heart and memory of someone else.
- Eli Wiesel

Center of the anemone

Anemone glows
Maple leaves twist and shimmer
Gold crimson scarlet

Near Junction Lake

In the sun

The grape harvest

If the heavens were not in love with wine,
There’d be no Wine Star in the sky.
And if earth wasn’t always drinking,
There’d be nowhere called Wine Spring.
I’ve heard that pure wine makes the Sage.
Even the cloudy makes us wise.
If even the wise get there through drink,
What’s the point of True Religions?
Three times and I understand the Way,
Six and I’m one again with Nature.
Only the things we know when we’re drunk
Can never be expressed when we’re sober.

- Li Po (699 – 762 AD)

Cosmos

There are times in one's life - when one simply has to stop, step out of one's routine and take the trouble to think. It's not a luxury but an obligation: how else to even try to make measured, considered decisions based on deliberation and self-awareness rather than on impulse or fear?

from Running to the Mountain by Jon Katz

Beauty streams through us

This world is all ours, belonging to each of us: swan, crane, walrus, wren, dog, muskrat, saxifrage, pine, polar bear, you, me. But too many of us have relinquished our hold on the natural world and turned toward power and the ownership of things. The circuit that binds air to ocean, river to mountain, snowdrift to glacier, ice to water, flows through each of us. … Beauty streams through us, inside and out, the way waves and skeins of radiant energy from the sun give us life.

- Gretel Ehrlich

Ivy flower

To change one's life: Start immediately.
Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.
- William James

Alberta Street Fair

True or false

We are at liberty to be real or unreal. We may be true or false. The choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects. And if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them.

- Thomas Merton

Hooks on you

Near the river

Understanding the needs of the world

Motherhood is not simply the organic process of giving birth ...
it is an understanding of the needs of the world.
- Alexis DeVeaux

Something good for a child

If you want to do something good for a child...
give him an environment where he can
touch things as much as he wants.
- Buckminster Fuller

Turkey sandwiches

Recipe for Great Turkey Sandwiches
Fresh challah rolls
Top quality sliced turkey
Best Foods mayonnaise (Hellman's on the east coast)
Dijon mustard
Black pepper
Alfalfa sprouts

Built to move

Man sometimes thinks like a tree - but he was built to move.
- Buckminster Fuller

The grand show

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere;
the dew is never all dried at once;
a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.

- John Muir

On the road

Fuzzy heads

Self

Our individual self finds its most complete realization within our family self, our community self, our species self, our earthly self, and eventually our universe self.

- Thomas Berry

In the woods

Go placidly amid the noise and haste and
remember what peace there may be in silence.

Each step

Every step that we take upon you should be done in a sacred manner;
each step should be as a prayer.
Black Elk - prayer to Mother Earth

Sorbet of roses

Recipe for Rose and Chardonnay Sorbet

2 cups (gently packed) organic rose petals
1 cup sugar
3 cups cold water
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
I cup Chardonnay wine

Process the rose petals with 1 cup of water and the sugar in a blender or food processor for about 30 seconds. Add remaining 2 cups water, the lemon juice and 1 cup wine and process for about 10 seconds.
Pour the liquid through a fine sieve.
Freeze the mixture in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's directions.

Universe

The whole universe is enhanced with the same breath,
rocks, trees, grass, earth, all animals, and men.

- Hopi saying

Beauty

"Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key;
it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code."

- Annie Dillard

Rainbow at dinner

The river's wild and noble sights, such as those in parlors never dream of.
- H.D. Thoreau

Where the wood drake rests

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
- Wendell Berry

A good life

For my mother, Peggy Perkins Lersch
April 23, 1915 - May 8, 2008

Who well lives, long lives;
for this age of ours should not be numbered
by years, days, and hours.

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas - 1578

The biggest heart

"The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. …There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived, we know nearly nothing. Nothing is known of the mating habits, the travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. But we know this: the animals with the largest heart in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles."

- Brian Doyle

Freedom, spontaneity and love

"Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of the unnumbered seeds perish and are lost because men are not prepared to receive them. For such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere, except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love."

- Thomas Merton

Bee's view

Real or unreal

"We are at liberty to be real or unreal. We may be true or false. The choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects. And if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them."

Thomas Merton

Despair is not required

“To be around young people, who haven’t yet made all of the compromises and concessions that life will urge them to make, and to see them finding old people who can help them go a different way, is to be reminded that the world really is constantly fresh, and that therefore despair for its prospects is not required.”

from Wandering Home by Bill McKibben

Shooting stars

“There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge.”

- Robert Henri

Inner toolbox

“I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, conscience, honesty – and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.”

- Annie Lamott

Obama in 2008

"They say we can't talk to our enemies; I say 'Watch me!' "
Barack Obama in Portland, Oregon, March 2008

The place of the artist

"I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than the full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. Where power corrupts, poetry cleanses."

- John F. Kennedy

Red chairs

“I’m not nearly as afraid of dying as I am of the hinges inside my mind and soul rusting closed. I am desperate to keep them open, because I think that if they close, that’s one’s first death, the loss of hope, curiosity and possibility, the spiritual death. After that, it seems to me, the second one is just a formality. I wanted to oil the hinges, force the doors to stay open."

- Jon Katz

New growth

“The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.”

from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Morning shadow

“You cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. Yes, in the end it is all a question of balance.”

from A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Restoration

"The monkey wrench is not a symbol of destruction. Ed Abbey told me right here on this ranch, the monkey wrench is a symbol of restoration. It's symbolic of your own talents. That's how you are going to fix the world - with your own gifts and talents."

- Ken Sleight

Making the images

"The world and this country need artists that have the strength and the singularity of vision to know that the best gift they can give is the commitment to making the images, because images are the magic. An artist should never lose sight of the first obligation – an artist is the only one who can make the art."

- Barbara Dougherty

Impermanence

“The realization of impermanence is paradoxically the only thing we can hold on to, perhaps our only lasting possession.”

Tibetan Lama Sogyal Rinpoche