The Long Boat

The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose

from its mooring, under

the screaking of the gulls,

he tried at first to wave

to his dear ones on shore,

but in the rolling fog

they had already lost their faces.

Too tired even to choose

between jumping and calling,

somehow he felt absolved and free

of his burdens, those mottoes

stamped on his name-tag:

conscience, ambition, and all

that caring.

He was content to lie down

with the family ghosts

in the slop of his cradle,

buffeted by the storm,

endlessly drifting.

Peace! Peace!

To be rocked by the Infinite!

As if it didn't matter

which way was home;

as if he didn't know

he loved the earth so much

he wanted to stay forever.

~Stanley Kunitz

(Digital art and photos by bz)

...stillness...

 

Entering into the utmost emptiness,

I maintain the stillness

wholeheartedly.

~Tao de Ching

This is what I am seeking:  stillness, silence, emptiness.  I know it is an inside job and lately I am at risk of being fired!  Internal demands to 'do' create a clatter that break the silence, disturb the stillness and muddy the emptiness.  I console myself that at least I have the goal in sight.  I will keep the above image and words before me as I face this week. 

 Do you have words or images that you use to re-align yourself?

AFTER YEARS

(a painting, a photograph, textures manipulated into digital art by bonnie zieman)

AFTER YEARS

Today, from a distance, I saw you

walking away, and without a sound

the glittering face of a glacier

slid into the sea. An ancient oak

fell in the Cumberlands, holding only

a handful of leaves, and an old woman

scattering corn to her chickens looked up

for an instant. At the other side

of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times

the size of our own sun exploded

and vanished, leaving a small green spot

on the astronomer's retina

as he stood on the great open dome

of my heart with no one to tell.

Ted Kooser

 

 

 

imprint beauty within

The key to our deepest happiness lies in changing our vision of where to find it.
~Sharon Salzberg


Our task is to imprint this provisional, perishable world so deeply in ourselves that its reality will arise in us later invisibly.
~Rainer Maria Rilke


I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
~Henry David Thoreau

wordle puzzle solutions

Here are the precise quotations from the Wordle puzzles in my last post:

"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."  ~Mark Twain

"He who climbs the highest mountain laughs loudest at the tragic dramas."  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

There was faint interest shown in this last set of Wordle puzzles.  Perhaps they were just  too wordy!   :-)  If I do them again I will make them less so and something that demands less effort and time from busy bloggers.

George from Transit Notes has another post today on the value of play in our lives.  It is full of quotes from creative minds about how play, as much as necessity, is the mother of invention.  Do take a moment to read it by clicking here.

more wordle puzzles

Congratulations - most of you were able to figure out the Wordle puzzle in my Sunday post!   The correct wordings of the quotations are:

**   There are many jewels in the mouth of the dragon.  Buddhist proverb

**   The only way to overcome suffering is to endure it.  Carl Jung

Linda Sue put a nice little twist on the game, using the wordle to come up with her own versions of the quotes.  She wrote:   "There are many jewels in the mouth of the buddhist dragon.  proverb", and "To be free of suffering, you must endure Carl Jung."  (That certainly seems to be the case when you come to this blog!  :-)  

So thank you Linda Sue, we are now going to follow your example and add the option of using the words from a quote in the wordle to formulate your own phrases.   You can also try to pull together the actual quote, and  if you are really gung ho you can do both!

The above wordle is a quote from Mark Twain.  When you see a word that is larger than the rest in the wordle, it means that word appears more than once in the quote.  So, in the wordle above, the word "to" needs to be used more than once to get the quotation right.  If you choose to make up your own phrase(s) from these words, you can use any of the words more than once, but ONLY the words in the wordle.

 

The above wordle is a quote from Nietzsche.  The large size of the word "the" indicates it is used more than once in the quote.  Same rules apply as above.  I will post the actual quotes for you on Wednesday and will hold the comments until then too.  Good luck and enjoy!

(P.S.  It seems it is not possible for me to see a comment and not automatically click "Publish".  So since I have already compulsively published two comments, I will publish them all.  So much for that idea!  Try not to look at others' comments if you want to really challenge yourself and give those brain cells a little workout!)

Let's Play!

After being inspired by George's post at Transit Notes yesterday (read it here), I decided to return to some more playful postings.  Here is a little Sunday word-play game for you.  

 Two quotations appear below, jumbled by Wordle.  Can you organize them into the original quote and post it in the comment section?  I will post the actual quotes on Tuesday.  I challenge you to resist reading the other comments before you post yours!  :-)

 I am going to do more of these and plan to make them progressively harder.  So dive in and get some practice now.  No prizes this time around, but when we get to some difficult ones I will be offering a photograph print for the first to get it right.  Stay tuned! 

(IMPORTANT:    When a word appears two or three times in the quote - such as 'it', 'the', 'and', 'you', - it can still only appear once in the Wordle image - so feel free to use some of the words more than once in your response if needed.)

... reflections on light ...

(Mixed-media artwork edited in PSE 8) 

A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection.  The point of ignition grows larger and the fire spreads in ever-widening circles, until finally the whole planet is suffused in light.  ~Teilhard de Chardin

God is Light.  God is said to be absolute -- and in physics, so is light.  God lies beyond the manifest world of matter, shape, and form, beyond both space and time -- so does light.  God cannot be known directly nor can light.  ~Peter Russell

I saw light gleaming in the unseen.  I gazed at it continually, until the time came when I had wholly become that light.  ~Abu'life-Hosain al-Nuri

Matter has reached the point of being able to know itself ... (A human) is a star's way of knowing about stars.  ~George Wald

Time and space are but ... colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The light that shines higher than heaven is the very same light we have within us .. There is nothing in the universe that is not myself.  ~Upanishads

Enlightenment is the light that wholeness brings.  ~Marie-Louise von Franz

We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence, which makes us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth.  When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but on the day our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.  ~Dag Hammarskjold


Having noticed myself recently reflecting a lot on light -- its forms, metaphors, warmth, call, pull, omnipresence -- I thought I would share some reflections by great thinkers on aspects of light.  Hope you find something to think upon among them. 

Know that your presence here sheds light on my path, and for that I am deeply grateful.  May your weekend be filled with light and love.  Bonnie

manipulations

Sorry if I disappoint you, but the manipulations of which I speak are of the digital kind.  Here is an example of what I have done in Photoshop Elements 8 with this mixed-media painting:

Above is the simple mixed-media piece.  I specifically kept it plain and uncluttered

knowing I wanted to use it to experiment with digital manipulations.

Here the image is doubled and reversed, and as you can see the colours intensified.

 

Again, the image is doubled and reversed and the background given a contrasting colour.

While I quite like this one, the previous 'manipulation' is the one I prefer.

...is it in their genes?

Yesterday, I spent the day with two of my favourite little people in the whole world.  I picked them up early in the day and we went out for hot chocolates and croissants (a latte for me).  Next stop, the bookstore.  Having all found something we could cozy up with on a hammock, we made our way out to 'the country'.

In spite of it being a beautiful day, the girls wanted to paint like Nana (moi) in Nana's studio.  In a few hours, they had each produced 3 pieces of artwork.  Their mother would soon arrive to join us for supper and to take them home. 

We had discussed the option of a sleepover and DH and I teased that they could  sleep outside in the 'treehouse' (above).  The 7 year old retorted that the spiderwebs would have to be cleared out before she would consider sleeping there.  Kids are so demanding these days.  As my daughter and I prepared supper, we noticed something strange going on in the treehouse.

Can you tell what they are doing?  Yes, they are scrubbing down the treehouse.  Buckets, brushes and rags are being used to scrub every piece of wood their little hands can reach.  (These photos are a little blurry because I took them through the kitchen window.  The girls are still in their painting-in-the-studio gear.)

DH had previously told them that he wanted to paint the treehouse this summer, but would have to wash it down before applying paint.  He never suggested they should be the ones to wash it down!  Were they cleaning it to help him, or because they wanted to sleep there overnight?  We weren't sure.  None of us had asked them to scrub the treehouse.  In fact, the idea would never have occurred to any of us!  Imagine living all these years without having scrubbed down the treehouse.

All hard-working women need a break from their labours.  Now they realize that we had been watching them cleaning - they seem both proud and a little self-conscious.  They revealed they did not want to sleep over in the treehouse, they simply thought it required a good cleaning!  Alrighty then ... how about doing the house next?

Back to work.  Even the floor was washed.  Do I have amazing granddaughters, or what?!!!!!

tree bling

Sitting outside drinking my morning coffee recently, my gaze centered on the billowing clouds resting over the mountain.  As I turned to pick up my book my eyes finally saw what had been right in front of me all the time - a beautifully draped heart-shaped necklace of leaves.  The wind had coaxed the two trailing ends of hanging ivy to hold hands and the result was another of nature's sweet surprises.  I have edited the photograph in PSE 8 to help light up the heart shape to make it distinct from the rest of the green foliage. 

(Wanda of Moments of Mine lives on a big piece of beautiful land in Ohio.  During her frequent walks over hill and dale she takes pictures of all the heart shapes she finds - on stones, in branches, tree trunks, flowers, etc.  So Wanda - here's another heart for you!)

I could not let this heart find go to waste, so spent a little time seeing how I could play with it in PSE 8.  Below is one of the results I came up with.  I added a texture to filter out some of the foliage behind the heart shape, and changed the colors.

one with nature

Reality is a spiritual experience;

nature is practicing Buddhism.

~Dogen Zenji

All who have achieved real excellence in any art possess one thing in common,

a mind to obey nature,

to be one with nature throughout the four seasons of the year.

~Basho

(P.S.  In response to a question from Brian, the image is a digital manipulation of an outline of a monk, a photograph of grasses, textures, some digital brushwork and tweaking of the colours.)

journal keeping

One of the books I am currently reading is The Journal Keeper by Phyllis Theroux.  It contains excerpts from her personal journals over a period of a few years in this decade.  Some of the reflections are about her joys, fears and challenges with the writing process itself, and some are about the personal details of her life.  Here are a few excerpts I read and enjoyed this morning:

"It is important to set down on paper--so one can really look at them--what one's deepest desires in life are.  I continue to return to the desire for a large and loving heart.  I would like that most of all.  Then I desire to be more disciplined and fruitful."  The Journal Keeper, p. 138

"A new thought--that writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go.  What excites me about this metaphor is that it makes writing much more of a lifesaving venture."  The Journal Keeper, p. 144

"I am beginning to look upon those who irritate me--the egoists, the overly emphatic, the nonstop talkers who press me against the wall--with more compassion.  It is still a temptation to strike out and say something mean but true that will rip away their facades.  But increasingly I am more inclined to look upon them as pilgrims who have gotten lost or forgotten where they are going, if they ever knew."  The Journal Keeper, p. 150

Over the years, in fits and starts (and stops) I have tried to keep a journal.  When I am not keeping a journal, I feel like I should.  When I do take time to keep a journal I think I am wasting time and could be doing something more fulfilling or productive.  I guess having a blog is a nice compromise.  What about you?  Are you a journal keeper?

P.S.  Many of our commenters have expressed how valuable they consider the act of journaling to be.  It is something that has proven psychological and physical benefits.  James W. Pennebaker, Ph.D., in his book Opening Up - The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, says there is a price our body pays when we inhibit self-expression.  He has a couple of chapters on writing and well-being.  So if you need concrete proof of the value of journaling you can check out his book, or just read the comments to this post!

quotes & questions

We have discovered that fear of self-knowledge is often parallel to fear of the outside world.

~Abraham Maslow

(Do you resist deepening your understanding of yourself?)

~~~~~

The human spirit is too large to accept a cage for its home.

~Huston Smith

(Are you living in a 'cage' of your own construction?)

~~~~~

I am the eye with which the Universe

Beholds itself and knows itself divine.

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

(Do you see the divine in the daily?)

~~~~~

A manipulated photograph of mine to please your eye (I hope!).

Some quotes and questions to feed your mind (Maybe?!).

I'd love to hear your reactions to any or all of the above.

~bz

P.S.  Nancy asked to see a close-up view of the centre pole.  This is the best I can do right now in the time available to me.  It is, as you thought Nancy, a collage of posters.  Pretty isn't it?

an afternoon at the farmers' market

Last Saturday afternoon we headed off to a farmers' market about 15 miles from where we live.  Due to the high temps, hot sun, and higher than average rainfall this season, crops are being harvested 2 weeks earlier than usual.  It was one of the mildest summer days we have had yet, 22 Celsius or about 74 fahrenheit.

 

Heading through small towns on the way to a farmers' market in Laprairie.

Our last purchase at the market was one of these little dark green watermelons with yellow flesh inside.  I was more interested in taking pictures of flowers than the vegetables.  Probably because my hands were carrying bags and counting out money.  Silly me - should have done both.

Once the bags of veggies were in the car, I brought out the camera and moved to the flower displays.

Please correct me if I err, but I think these are rudbeckia or echinacea; and purple liatris.

(Friko informs us that the yellow flowers are rudbeckia.  Thanks Friko!)

A buddha in quiet contemplation.

Another buddha whose mouth curved in a funny sneer - that just had to be cropped off.

Love the combination of the coral/orange with the shocking pink.  I cannot recall the name of this plant whose crepe-y leaves take on such bold colours.  Help please!

(Delwyn informs us that these are bouganvillea.  Thanks Delwyn, I knew that but it escaped me!)

Just adore the pairing of sunset colours here.

After a hard day strolling through the farmers' market, we decided we deserved to have supper out at a nearby Japanese restaurant.   We were arriving unfashionably early.  Montrealers do not eat and go somewhere else after, e.g. to a concert ... they make an evening out of dining.  So they start late and take their time.  Thus all the empty seats.  Not to worry they will soon fill up.

 Niji has beautiful tooled metal doors.

 Buddhas are sprinkled throughout the restaurant to create a peaceful ambiance.

 A little sake is essential - before and during the meal.

 As is a bit more photography.  My poor DH.  He is SO long-suffering.

 DH encouraged me to take a picture of this naked man, in an effort to escape my lens himself.  The tomato could not be coaxed off.

 By the time we leave the restaurant the sun is setting.

Almost home.  Crossing the bridge over the river that leads to the base of our dear mountain.  We live off to the left between the mountain and the river, with a mountain stream heading to the river cutting through our land.  Tomorrow many of the vegetables purchased at the market will be made into a spicy gazpacho to serve to several members of our family visiting for the day.

intricacies

A photograph of one of my paintings edited in Photoshop Elements with a photograph of trees on our land.  It makes me think that while life is beautiful, it is sometimes complex and intricate, requiring you to stop a while to get your bearings.

"Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the stamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap."
~Vladimir Nabokov

one way to manage existential sadness

Comments on the last post indicate that many of you can relate to the quiet presence of existential sadness.  We all carry this in some measure just by walking as a human on Planet Earth. 


Sadness, however, can be a seductive siren, tempting us to stay and build altars to our losses on her jagged shores.  While it is important to allow and honour our feelings as they emerge, it is also important to remember that feelings are not meant to engulf or imprison us - they are meant to flow through - always leading to the next feeling - and the next.  Keep your feelings in a state of flow (e-motion).  Letting go of one (when ready) makes room for the next. 


Don't erect an altar to your wounds, losses and sadness.  Acknowledge them, work through them, and use them as a signal to celebrate what is left to you.  While loved ones, status, wealth, reputation, work, etc. can fall away, we always have access to beauty.  We can always use beauty as a touchstone to remember who we are and what matters to us.  Use beauty to access gratitude and appreciation which are probably the feelings that most mirror an enlightened state of being.  Gratitude and appreciation are healing feelings.  They signal our cells that we love life.  Use the beauty that surrounds you to help heal a wounded or lonely heart. 

For more encouragement in this regard, I am including a quote from Nietzsche and wise words from John O'Donohue.  I hope you find them helpful.

 

Beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life.

~Nietzsche

"In the shadowlands of pain and despair we find slow, dark beauty.  The primeval conversation between darkness and beauty is not audible to the human ear and the threshold where they engage each other is not visible to the eye. Yet at the deepest core they seem to be at work with each other.....The luminous beauty of great art so often issues from the deepest, darkest wounding. 

We always seem to visualize a wound as a sore, a tear on the skin's surface.  The protective outer layer is broken and the sensitive interior is invaded and torn.  Perhaps there is another way to image a wound.  It is the place where the sealed surface that keeps the interior hidden is broken.  A wound is also, therefore, a breakage that lets in light and a sore place where much of the hidden pain of a body surfaces.....While the wound is open, new light flows into the helpless dark and the inner night of the body weeps through the wound.....It ruptures through the ordinary cover of words we put on things.....

Where woundedness can be refined into beauty a wonderful transfiguration takes place.  For instance, compassion is one of the most beautiful presences a person can bring to the world and most compassion is born from one's own woundedness."

(excerpted from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O'Donohue, pp 179-180)