“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
“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous. ”
–Aristotle
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
“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…
“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
“I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost.”
-Percy Shelley
There is radiance here
in these unfolding years.
Simplicity deepens.
Alone-ness widens perspective.
Solitude forms a presence.
In the quietness the trees share their secrets
and the ravens tell their tales.
The mountains form the foundation of everything,
while the big sky holds them in a warm embrace.
The stilled mind cascades into wonder.
That is where the radiance lies, shimmering in that wonder.
I stay there now as often as I can.
“When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, …and the doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?”
– Seneca
“Going to the woods is going home.”
-John Muir
“My roots are in the depths of the woods.”
– Galle
To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.”
– Mikhail Gorbachev
“To lie under a tree listening to the murmur of the water, and watching the clouds float across the sky is by no means a waster of time.”
-John Lubbock
