Category Archives: Photography

Photography, Sweet Breathing

Joy of Inner Belonging

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JOURNEY OF THE SOUL (John O’Donohue)

“One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging.”

-John O’Donohue

 

Fall, Home, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing

The Earth Remembered Me

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I cannot get enough of Mary Oliver right now… her words are buoying me, reminding me of the earth’s deep sustenance and peace.

The earth does remember me and my heart is full of gratitude.  I am deeply embedded in her peaceful embrace today with the rain sweetly softening and nourishing…

Softening and nourishing and sweetening everything including me.

“I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times’
into something better.”
-Mary Oliver

 

Home, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing

Love All the Things

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How I needed this today – I absorbed these words by David Whythe through every cell, with thankfulness and grace.
THE HOUSE OF BELONGING
I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.
But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.
And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.
This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny close
grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels
of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun had made.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.”
-David Whyte (The House of Belonging)

“There is nothing like waking in a sunlit room with view, but perhaps nothing better than waking in a sunlit room with a view than waking with a writing desk in a sunlit room with a view. And in the case of this poem, waking in a sunlit room with a writing desk and a view after a passing through a very dark passage in life. ‘What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky? Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk?”

-David Whyte

 

 

Home, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing

Walk Slowly and Bow Often

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When I Am Among the Trees (by Mary Oliver)
“When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
-Mary Oliver
Glacier National Park, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing

You Are Earth

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“You are comprised of: 84 minerals, 23 Elements, and 8 gallons of water spread across 38 trillion cells. You have been built up from nothing by the spare parts of the Earth you have consumed, according to a set of instructions hidden in a double helix and small enough to be carried by a sperm. You are recycled butterflies, plants, rocks, streams, firewood, wolf fur, and shark teeth, broken down to their smallest parts and rebuilt into our planet’s most complex living thing. You are not living on Earth. You are Earth.”
– Aubrey Marcus

“Nature is not matter only. She is also spirit.”
– Carl Jung
Glacier Prisms

 

Animals, Glacier National Park, Home, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing

An Acre, Any Being, Any Waterway

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“When you truly love any acre, any being, any waterway, you love them all and realize you’re intimately connected. You can’t change everything, but you can love it all.”

-Kitty O’Meara (from 4/26/21 blog post “Ordinary Things of Conspicuous Value” – The Daily Round

Ordinary Things of Conspicuous Value

Glacier National Park, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photo Gallery, Photography, Sweet Breathing

The Beauty of the Trees, The Softness of the Air

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“The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air,…speaks to me.
The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky… speaks to me.
The faintness of the stars, the freshness of the morning… speaks to me.
The strength of fire, the trail of the sun and the life that never goes away. They speak to me and my heart soars.”
~Chief Dan George
They speak to me too…

 

Crater Lake National Park, Glacier National Park, Home, Inspiring Words, Nature, Photography, Sweet Breathing, Travel Adventure

Mountains, Woods, Rivers, Lakes, Beaches – Find Me Inside

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Mountains, Woods, Rivers, Lakes, Beaches….

 

This is the God or nature of Spinoza:

“God would have said:
Stop praying and punching yourself in the chest!
What I want you to do is go out into the world and enjoy your life.
I want you to enjoy, sing, have fun and enjoy everything I’ve made for you.
Stop going to those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and say they are my house!
My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That’s where I live and there I express my love for you.
Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner, or that your sexuality was a bad thing!
Sex is a gift I have given you and with which you can express your love, your ecstasy, your joy. So don’t blame me for everything they made you believe.
Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can’t read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son’s eyes…
you will find me in no book!
Trust me and stop asking me. Will you tell me how to do my job?
Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you, I criticize you, nor get angry, or bother, or punishment. I am pure love.
Stop asking for forgiveness, there’s nothing to forgive. If I made you… I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies… free will. How can I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? How can I punish you for being the way you are, if I’m the one who made you Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who behave badly for the rest of eternity?
What kind of god can do that?
Forget any kind of commandments, any kind of laws; those are wiles to manipulate you, to control you, that only create guilt in you.
Respect your peers and don’t do what you don’t want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that your alert is your guide.
My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step, not a step in the way, not a rehearsal, nor a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing here and now and all you need.
I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record.
You are absolutely free to create in your life heaven or hell.
I could tell you if there’s anything after this life but I can give you a tip. Live as if there is no. As if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist.
So, if there’s nothing, then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is, rest assured that I won’t ask if you behaved right or wrong, I’ll ask. Did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?…
Stop believing in me; believing is assuming, guessing, imagining. I don’t want you to believe in me, I want you to feel in you. I want you to feel me in you when you kiss your beloved, when you tuck your little girl, when you caress your dog, when you bathe in the sea.
Stop praising me, what kind of egomaniac God do you think I am?
I’m bored being praised, I’m tired of being thanked. Feeling grateful? Prove it by taking care of you, your health, your relationships, the world. Feeling looked at, shocked?… Express your joy! That’s the way to praise me.
Stop complicating things and repeating as a parakeet what you’ve been taught about me.
The only thing for sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders.
What do you need more miracles for? Why so many explanations?
look for me outside, you won’t find me. Find me inside… there I am beating on you.”
-Spinoza