My online journal where I share my interests in photography, nature, journaling, fountain pens, bicycling, coffee life, spirituality and the mystery of it all.
This is our modern curse: A century of conspicuous consumption has trained us to be dutiful citizens of the Republic of Not Enough, swearing allegiance to the marketable myth of scarcity, hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse. Along the way, we have unlearned how to live wide-eyed with wonder at what Hermann Hesse called “the little joys” — those unpurchasable, unstorable emblems of aliveness that abound the moment we look up from our ledger of lack.
Maria Popova
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.
Breathe in, breathe out,
Julia Fehrenbacher
breathe until you feel your bigness,
until the sun rises in your veins.
Breathe until you stop needing
anything to be different.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
We are bathing in mystery and confusion. That will always be our destiny.
Carl Sagan
The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.
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
… anyone who notices the world must want to save it.
Rebecca Baggett
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.
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.
“Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.”
Don Miguel Ruiz
in the barren cottonwood tree
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
dozens of birds, all of them still,
as if, like me, they are enthralled
doubtful they could ever improve
on all this glorious silence
The glorious silence from the nights snow filled my bedroom. I could feel the cold as I lay under the covers. After a prayer of thanks I enter into this new day. I dress and make my bed then spend 20 minutes on my meditation cushion. More silence. Journaling. More silence. I make a bowl of cereal with a banana and a chai latte. My day is starting off good. It looks like 3 inches of snow fell during the night and it is 14 degrees. No bicycling or picnic today. Eric and I will talk on the phone rather than get out in this weather. Stay warm and enjoy the silence!