• clouds,  landscape,  quotes,  sunsets,  trees

    Sitting Quietly

    All of humanity’s difficulties stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

    Blaise Pascal

    This is a snapshot of Mike watching the sunset at Turquoise Lake, Colorado, while on our motorcycle camping trip in 2006. It was one of those moments to just sit quietly and soak it all in.

  • landscape,  quotes,  silence,  sunsets,  trees

    Silence is the stuff of life…

    I am constantly surrounded by noise: TV, texts, the internet, music, meaningless small talk, my thinking. All of it blocks my consciousness, my ability to hear the ME that exists beneath the cacophony. I am my consciousness, my awareness of my circumstance, my presence in every moment. So I cultivate silence every morning. I sit in it, bask in it, wrap it around myself, and hear and feel me. Then, wherever the day takes me, the people I meet are the beneficiaries of my having taken that time – they get the real me, not someone shaped and altered by the noise around me. Silence is the stuff of life.

    Richard Wagamese, Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations
  • coffee life,  quotes,  trees

    … join the dance

    The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

    Alan Watts

    I arrived four minutes before the coffee shop opened and stood outside. I watched and listened as the wind blew begging the trees to dance with her. Even in these unsettled times of our society and with the wind of change blowing, I stood there having a feeling of being settled and calm inside. I took a couple long steady breaths of prayer, raised my camera and took four images of the gently swaying trees. Shortly, my barista, Winter, opened the door and I entered to enjoy her mocha latte and the gift of my coffee life. And, I knew I was joining in the dance.

  • frost,  landscape,  quotes,  trees,  winter scenes

    Damn it’s cold!

    The contemplative discipline of meditation… doesn’t acquire anything. In that sense, and an important sense, it is not a technique but a surrendering of deeply imbedded resistances that allows the sacred within gradually to reveal itself as a simple, fundamental fact.

    Martin Laid

    This image was handheld when it was 7 degrees and with a slight breeze out of the northeast. Because of those two factors it is not sharp, probably true of more of my images than I want to admit, but I do like the feel of it. It shouts, “Damn it’s cold!” On the upside we are moving into a few days of warmer weather, reaching into the 60’s.