An owl sat once with his sharp hearing, his watchfulness,
his bill, half-grown, majestic on my finger;
then I felt his huge and yellow stare
plant something foreign in me, a deep quiet,
a mad freedom; my heart laughed
when the bird raised his soft wings.
Thorkild Bjornvig, B. 1918, From “The Owl”
Today I saw a red kite flying close to the house here in the Black Forest. A rare sight. This quote from a longer poem strikes a cord. Once I met an owl, twice actually, and each time I was struck deeply by the depth of their presence.
Found two lilies open in the very shallow inlet of the meadow. Exquisitely beautiful, and unlike anything else we have, is the first white Lily just expanded in some shallow lagoon where the water is leaving it, – perfectly fresh and pure, before the insects have discovered it.
How admirable its purity! How innocently sweet its fragrance! How significant that the rich, black mud of our dead stream produces the water-lily, – out of that fertile slime springs this spotless purity! It is remarkable that those flowers which are most emblematical of purity should grow in the mud.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)
Thanks to the reader who emailed me this most wonderful image of tulips. Rare beauties!
Thanks for linking to JM Nathen. I am back on-line again, on a borrowed computer. Having only a limited window of access is going to be a good thing I,m thinking.
Oh well it happens some times. The hard drive of a computer fails, it no longer is able to function. It dies. And that is what has happened to the hard drive of the computer I am traveling with. So I most likely will not be able to post much, if at all, for the next two weeks.
I am past the mourning stage with all the aspects of disbelief, anger etc. No I have gone directly to acceptance. Extreme circumstances causes one to take a big leap. It just happens.
Practice Within The Order of Buddhist Contemplatives