Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
(Earth Blessings: Prayers, Poems & Meditations)
visible things
Author: Barbara Rodgers
laconic noons and sterner sundowns
It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sundowns sterner, and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.
~ Emily Dickinson
(Letter to Elizabeth Chapin Holland, November 1865)
Autumn wins you best by this its mute
Appeal to sympathy for its decay!
~ Robert Browning
(Paracelsus)
a thousand unbreakable lines
I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable lines between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves — we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.
~ Mary Oliver
(Upstream: Selected Essays)
ghosts
We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
~ Liam Callanan
(The Cloud Atlas)
ghastly
‘Tis so appalling – it exhilarates –
So over Horror, it half captivates –
…
And Terror’s free –
Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #341)
life so sweet
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we don’t believe
Does not exhilarate.
That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate —
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1761)
indolent-ripe on the tree
Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fullness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light,
and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!
~ Walt Whitman
(Sands at Seventy)
lizard rule
“On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. …
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”
~ Douglas Adams
(Science Fiction Quotations: From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits)
nature not dualistic
Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska
Nature isn’t dualistic. It isn’t merely a collection of separate parts. It doesn’t throw anything away. It recycles everything. And it doesn’t operate out of a desire to improve things. While we fixate on the parts, nature acts out of the Whole.
~ Steve Hagen
(Buddhism Is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom Beyond Beliefs)