“To-day I think
Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
And the square mustard field;
Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;
The smoke's smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.
It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth."
- A poem called DIGGING.”
― Edward Thomas, Collected Poems
“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion -
“After centuries of philosophy and religious elucidations, a good ass, at the end of the day, remains the most compelling answer to the eternal question about the meaning of life.”
“…For thousands and thousands of years the idea of the serpent, the ram, the horned animal, were considered sacred . Pagan gods like Pan (Greek) and Bes (Egyptian) were used to inspire paintings of the Devil in Christian churches in efforts to demonize other religion’s gods. “Archaeological evidence, especially the work of Sir John Marshall, reveals that before the Aryan invasions the indigenous population of India revered the Goddess… She appeared in the Puranas and Tantras under many names, but the name “Devi" simply combined them all.” -Merlin Stone. ("Devil" was Devi+evil is also an interesting coincidence.)
The old testament documents the takeover of the patriarchy, a male god who gives birth to a man, who, with the man’s rib gives birth to a woman. Women go to cause the downfall of the whole human race led by a talking serpent. This attack on any remaining traces of the Goddess and the mystical power of nature and women. Creation became removed from the divine, women were the progenitors of sin.
If we are taught keep looking toward an invisible being, a heavenly hope, and a god of light, how could we love the earth beneath our feet and her dark fertile soil?
How could we protect the fragile, the feminine, the wild, if a patriarchal god of war and fear was all we knew?
“Devil” is raised again in my world, not as a symbol of evil, but as a remembrance of the feminine forest spirit of old, decorated with ancient symbols of fertility and energy. “
"There was a reason
that she was so romantic
about the moon.
It never asked her
questions or begged
for the answers nor
did she ever have
to prove herself
to it.
It was always just
there– breathing,
shining,
and in ways most
humans can’t understand:
Listening."
--Christopher Poindexter -
Everything we do leaves traces. All the conversations we have leave behind thoughts. Everything we see leaves behind images. We leave feelings in everyone who loves us. With everyone we love, we betray ourselves. We leave traces wherever we go, no matter who we talk to, no matter who we love, no matter what we do
“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letters on Cézanne’ -
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Moveable Feast’-
"But to destroy patriotism, it is first necessary to produce conviction that it is an evil; and that is difficult to do. Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most will agree; but with a reservation. "Yes," they will say, "wrong patriotism is an evil; but there is another kind, the kind we hold." But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.
If good patriotism consists in in aggressiveness, as many say, still, all patriotism, even if not aggressive, is necessarily retentive; that is, people wish to keep what they have previously conquered. The nation does not exist which was founded without conquest; and conquest can only be retained by the means which achieved it—namely, violence, murder. But if patriotism be not even retentive, it is then the restoring patriotism of conquered and oppressed nations; of Armenians, Poles, Czechs, Irish, and so on. And this patriotism is about the very worst; for it is the most embittered and the most provocative of violence.
Patriotism cannot be good. Why do not people say that egoism may be good? For this might more easily be maintained as to egoism, which is a natural and inborn feeling, than as to patriotism, which is an unnatural feeling, artificially grafted on man."
- Patriotism, or Peace? (1896), Leo Tolstoy-