A Pause for Beauty:
An artist’s journal.
The Deep Heart’s Core
Each of us has an Up North. It’s a time and a place far from the here and now. It’s a map on the wall, a dream in the making, a tugging at one’s soul. For those who feel the tug, who make the dream happen, who put the map in the packsack and go, the world is never quite the same.
- Sam Cook, Up North
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
- William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Journal note:
A lake with no roads
A blank spot on the map
Where humans seldom visit
And water laps softly against the shore
Loons call at sunset
A place to put up a tent
And sleep.
When time permits
And imagine, retreat into
In the deep heart’s core.
When, as Thoreau described it,
Life takes on a quiet desperation.