“Dear Lord/ Lest I continue/ My complacent way/ Help me to remember
Somehow out there/ A man died for me today./ As long as there be war
I then must/ Ask and answer/ Am I worth dying for?”
A poem Eleanor Roosevelt kept in her wallet during WWII.
Photography
Summertime blues. “Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny molecules of air in Earth’s atmosphere. Blue is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.” NASA * Scala & Kolacny – California Dreamin’
Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues except maybe summer’s cool green turquoise waters.
The Apache believe turquoise filled the pot at the end of the rainbow. – Turquoise meanings.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Gone, But Not Forgotten
On Darkness, – Rainer Maria Rilke
“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything;
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.”
Carol of the Bells – Nox Arcana
“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
― William Shakespeare
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas – Johnny Mathis
WILD GEESE
Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good,
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting,
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on,
Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
Over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers,
Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination.
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,
Over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Cry Of The Wild Goose – Frankie Laine
I found the best light in the dark. — Arturo Macias Uceda
While families may be getting together throughout the holiday season, photographers will be getting together for another Leanne Cole and Laura Macky’s Monochrome Madness on Leanne’s blog later on today. We can all be extremely thankful for Leanne’s dedication and hard work in putting this together weekly and to all of the creative and very talented cast of international contributors.
ஜ ۩ ۩ ۩ ஜ
“Love is a friendship set to music.” — Joseph Campbell
Aadays Tisai Aadays
In a Gondola
The moth’s kiss, first!
Kiss me as if you made believe
You were not sure, this eve,
How my face, your flower, had pursed
Its petals up; so, here and there
You brush it, till I grow aware
Who wants me, and wide open I burst.
The bee’s kiss, now!
Kiss me as if you enter’d gay
My heart at some noonday,
A bud that dares not disallow
The claim, so all is rendered up,
And passively its shattered cup
Over your head to sleep I bow.
Robert Browning
“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality.
It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.” — Oscar Wilde
Maverick Mist 