“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow
in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nature
And now you ask in your heart,
“How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure
from that which is not good?”
Go to your fields and your gardens,
and you shall learn that it is the pleasure
of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower,
the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.
People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.
─ Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
“There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first
consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.”
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I Like You When You Are Quiet
Pablo Neruda
I like you when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent,
and you hear me from far away, and my voice does not touch you.
It looks as though your eyes had flown away
and it looks as if a kiss had sealed your mouth.
Like all things are full of my soul
You emerge from the things, full of my soul.
Dream butterfly, you look like my soul,
and you look like a melancoly word.
I like you when you are quiet and it is as though you are distant.
It is as though you are complaining, butterfly in lullaby.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
let me fall quiet with your own silence.
Let me also speak to you with your silence
Clear like a lamp, simple like a ring.
You are like the night, quiet and constellated.
Your silence is of a star, so far away and solitary.
I like you when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent.
Distant and painful as if you had died.
A word then, a smile is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it is not true.
“If you love something set it free; if it returns it’s yours forever, if not it was never meant to be.”
“My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” — Song of Songs
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” William Shakespeare
“Water is the driving force of all nature.” — Leonardo da Vinci
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” William Faulkner
Maverick Mist 