There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
— Aldous Huxley
A young girl wearing a falconer’s mitt working with a large bird in a small living room.
Untitled (Brooklyn, NY), 2005, Anthony Lepore
Lucks, My Fair Falcon
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
Lucks, my fair falcon, and your fellows all,
How well pleasant it were your liberty!
Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall.
But they that sometime liked my company:
Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl.
Lo what a proof in light adversity!
But ye my birds, I swear by all your bells,
Ye be my friends, and so be but few else.
Hymn to Iris
Alice OswaldQuick moving goddess of the rainbow
You whose being is only an afterglow of a passing-throughPut your hands
Put your heaven-taken shape down
On the ground. Now. AnywhereLike a bent- down bough of nothing
A bridge built out of the linked cells of thin airAnd let there be instantly in its underlight –
At street corners, on swings, out of car windows –
A three-moment blessing for all bridgesMay impossible rifts be often delicately crossed
By bridges of two thrown ropes or one dropped plankMay the unfixed forms of water be warily leaned over
On flexible high bridges, huge iron sketches of the mathematics of strain
And bridges of see-through stone, the living-space of drips and echoesMay two fields be bridged by a stile
And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glanceRichardAnd may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word,
Like in the wind the trace of a web. Tethered to nothing
Yinka Shonibare, Planets in My Head, Physics, 2010.
A Solar Eclipse Ella Wheeler Wilcox In that great journey of the stars through space About the mighty, all-directing Sun, The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one Companion of the Earth. Her tender face, Pale with the swift, keen purpose of that race, Which at Time’s natal hour was first begun, Shines ever on her lover as they run And lights his orbit with her silvery smile. Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise, Down from her beaten path she softly slips, And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes, Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips. While far and near the men our world call wise See only that the Sun is in eclipse.
“I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever... and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded.” - Frederic Sackrider Remington
“In Venus Rising from the Sea, Raphaelle Peale created the illusion of a cloth hiding a bathing woman. Technical examination, however, reveals that her body does not continue underneath the linen. The visible figural elements add to the deception. They were derived not from life, but from a print of an earlier canvas by the Englishman James Barry. Peale’s deception draws on the ancient Roman author Pliny’s account of a competition between two Greeks to determine the better artist. While Zeuxis painted grapes so convincingly that birds pecked at them, Parrhasios painted a curtain so realistically that it tricked his fellow artist. Peale’s design also alludes to the contemporary practice of covering paintings of nudes, one that he deemed ridiculous though his father Charles Willson Peale found it prudent.” — From the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. ☄️
It’s very tough for me to focus. I’m like: ‘Look, something shiny! No, focus. Oh, there goes a butterfly!’ — Gabby Douglas
“I think the real test is to plan something and be able to carry it out to the very end. Not that you're always enthusiastic; it's just that you have to get this thing out. It's not done with one's emotions; it's done with the head.” — Richard Estes
Maverick Mist 