in the case of this picture, a huge raven is perched on the bare branch. Still I paired these two, the quote and the photo, for the song in Basho’s words and the blue black beauty of this raven.
“Go outside and don’t go to a special place. Just go into your neighborhood and repeatedly, over and over again, open your ears and harvest the sounds all around you. Whether those are tree sounds or car sounds or bird sounds. Without judgment, just be present for the physical experience of sounds flowing into our consciousness. Do that over and over again and the trees will befriend you — or come into your consciousness and teach you some of what they’re saying.”
“Ah, Lovely October, as you usher in the season that awakens my soul, your awesome beauty compels my spirit to soar like an leaf caught in an autumn breeze and my heart to sing like a heavenly choir.”
“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cezanne
“He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.”
