“Between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
-Viktor Frankl
“And the wiser you get, the more you slow down your thinking, and the more conscious you become of your emotional triggers, the more you can expand that tiny little pause – that precious little space – in which to CHOOSE how to be. That’s where it’s at. Choosing instead of reacting.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert
Tag Archives: Nature
They Are Other Nations
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals… We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of haven taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours…gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.
-Henry Beston
Like A Promised Sunrise, Your Laughter & The Light in Your Eyes
“You rose into my life like a promised sunrise, brightening my days with the light in your eyes.”
-Maya Angelou
“Take bread away from me, if you wish, take air away, but do not take from me your laughter.”
-Pablo Neruda
Like a promised sunrise, your laughter and the light in your eyes….
A Strange Idea
“How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.
If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.
The white man’s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man — all belong to the same family.”-Chief Seattle
Once You Are Real
“He said, ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.'”
-Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
The Time of Inner Workings
Something of the Marvelous
“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous. ”
–Aristotle
The World in White
These snow days are sweet with wonder. The white carpet ensconces us warmly, allowing a deep simmering. The simmering distills to peace.
A soul distilled from simmering shimmers with radiance reflecting the peace within.
Sweet, soft glow across the snow. Oneness of white.
Time stills.
“There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.” – Joseph Wood Krutch
“Lo. sifted through the winds that blow, Down comes the soft and silent snow, White petals from the flowers that grow In the cold atmosphere.” -George W. Bungay
A New and Different Sun
“The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
~Christopher McCandless
Oh yes each day, every last one of them, whether spent at home in the familiar, or on a new exotic adventure, holds the promise of a different sun, and an endlessly changing horizon. Taking the time to absorb these wonders, in the new encounter with the often explored, or with the totally new experience, brings wonder into the moment, into our days, into our lives.
The picture above is from home, the one below from Bryce Canyon National Park, and the one below that from Amelia Island, Florida, and the final one from this year’s Christmas Day at home – a new and different sun as the sun rises to begin a new day each and every one…
The Art of Nature
“Were I called upon to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the mist.”
-Edgar Allan Poe
“The joy of looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.”
-Albert Einstein
