Earth in beauty dressed
Awaits returning spring.
All true love must die,
Alter at the best
Into some lesser thing.
Prove that I lie.
Photography
Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen. -- Eckhart Tolle
“Elephants are social animals with a high degree of intelligence similar to dolphins and great apes. These gentle giants have the longest gestation period of all mammals, carrying their developing babies for nearly two years before giving birth. Because elephants are the largest land animal in the world with the biggest brains, their long gestation period allows for proper development of the fetus in the womb. After the gestation period, a single elephant calf is born that weights about 265 pounds. While female elephants can live up to 70 years, they generally only give birth to four babies during their lifetime.” * Where are all the African elephants? 🐘
“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.” ― Ernest Hemingway
“Owls live within the darkness, which includes magic, mystery, and ancient knowledge. Related to the night is the moon, which owls are also connected to. It becomes a symbol of the feminine and fertility, with the moon’s cycles of renewal. Even the mythology relates owl to this wisdom and femininity.” *
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature,
he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” – John Muir
“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
A wonderful bird is the pelican
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the helican!
Dixon Lanier Merritt
The cheetah is the fastest animal on land and unlike other big cats, cheetahs cannot roar.
However, they are the largest cat that can purr on both inhale and exhale, like domestic cats.
Half the world’s fastest cats will be gone in 15 years—and that’s being optimistic.
The Easter Flower
by Claude McKay
Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;
Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;
And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.
A Birthday
Christina Rossetti
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
Maverick Mist 