“If you love all things, you will also attain the divine mystery that is in all things. For then your ability to perceive the truth will grow every day, and your mind will open itself to an all-embracing love” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Nature
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” — Melody Beattie ………🦃
“I respect hippos. They just look the way they do;
they can’t do anything about it, but they don’t seem bothered.” — Laura Mvula
“The depths of winter longing are ice within my heart
The shards of broken covenants lie sharp against my soul
The wraiths of long-lost ecstasy still keep us two apart
The amen winds of bitterness still keen from turn to pole.
The scares are twisted tendons, the stumps of struck-off limbs,
The aching pit of hunger and throb of unset bone,
My sanded burning eyeballs, as might within them dims,
Add nothin to the torment of lying here alone…
The shimmering flames of fever trace out your blessed face
My broken eardrums echo yet your voice inside my head
I do not fear the darkness that comes to me apace
I only dread the loss of you thy comes when I am dead.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition
By Shihab Al-Din Al-Nuwayri (excerpt)
Aristotle said: “A cheetah is a cross between a lion and a panthress, or a panther and a lioness.” It is said that if a cheetah has a difficult pregnancy, any male cheetah that sees her will take care of her and share the fruits of his hunt. When she is ready to give birth, she secludes herself in a place that she has prepared and remains there until she teaches her young how to hunt. The cheetah is proverbial for its sleepiness.
Al-Jahiz said, quoting Aristotle: “If a cheetah is afflicted with the disease known as cheetah-strangler, it may eat some dung and thereby be cured.” And they say that there is no animal the size of a cheetah that falls so heavily and shatteringly upon the back of its prey. The females are more refractory and bold than the males. Modesty is part of its nature, such that if a man runs his hand along the body of a female cheetah, she will remain calm until his hand approaches the vulva, at which point she will grow agitated and angry.
“There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf,
singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.” ― Dejan Stojanovic
Tiger
William Blake
TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
“On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads,
as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels . . .” — Charles Dickens
“Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein “starts” shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Maverick Mist 