After a long absence
from blogging, I am returning
with a new blog that will be devoted
primarily to my explorations in photography.
A journal of discoveries made while "wavering between the profit and the loss, in this brief transit where the dreams cross." T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.John Muir, The Mountains of California
If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is a possibility of beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, of it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
[T]his piece is written almost like a conversation in the mirror, trying to remind myself what's first-order. And we have so many allies in this world, including just the color blue in the sky, which we're not paying attention to, or the breeze, or the ground beneath our feet. And so this is an invitation to come out of abstraction and back to the world again. It's called "Everything is Waiting For You."