“There is, at least there sometimes seems to be, a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things, a mysterious blessedness.”

— Aldous Huxley

The Dove

by Leonard Cohen

I saw the dove come down, the dove with the green twig, the childish dove out of the storm and flood. It came towards me in the style of the Holy Spirit descending. I had been sitting in a cafe for twenty-five years waiting for this vision. It hovered over the great quarrel. I surrendered to the iron laws of the moral universe which make a boredom out of everything desired. Do not surrender, said the dove. I have come to make a nest in your shoe. I want your step to be light.

Bernd Webler

#art

“The roots of loneliness are very deep … They find their food in the suspicion that there is no-one who cares and offers love without conditions.”

— Henri Nouwen

Painter unknown

"The inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power. Silence belongs to it. If jeeps find it out, or a funicular railway disfigures it, part of its meaning will be gone. The good of the greatest is not here relevant. It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not on behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness."

— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

17. So I guess it’s time to let go of my tears, to let you go on into the night, quietly, quietly, as you let the world go, voice cut from you by the surgeon’s knife, only your hands to say goodbye, touching the leaves of the lemon tree one last time, or Britta’s pale, shivering arm, or trying to hold forever in your eyes this olive-tree twisted in the valley winds, or this flash of sunlight off the high Sierra snows.

Burton Hatlen, from Crossing Altamont

A bird came down the walk: He did not know I saw; He bit an angle-worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew From a convenient grass, And then hopped sidewise to the wall To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all abroad,- They looked like frightened beads, I thought; He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious, I offered him a crumb, And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or butterflies, off banks of noon, Leap, splashless, as they swim.

— Emily Dickinson, A Bird Came Down

David Lupton, illustration for the Folio Society edition of The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries. When the burdocks rustle in the ravine and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops I compose happy verses about life's decay, decay and beauty. I come back. The fluffy cat licks my palm, purrs so sweetly and the fire flares bright on the saw-mill turret by the lake. Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof occasionally breaks the silence. If you knock on my door I may not even hear.

—Anna Akhmatova

Metamorphosis

10″x6″ Pencil and powdered graphite on bristol

Sometimes letting go changes everything.

“الشجاع حر.”

— سنيكا الأصغر المصدر: خلِّدها - مقولات عن الحرية

Tanka # 227

In all the places where I imagined I'd find you I found only my longing

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