A Pause For Beauty:
An artist’s journal.
Below, the Art Journal posts for the month of September, 2023.
August posts can be found here.
Out of the clouds I hear a faint bark, as of a faraway dog. It is strange how the world cocks its ear to that sound, wondering. Soon it is louder: the honk of geese, invisible, but coming on.
- Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac
For the rest of Leopold's end of summer reflection, and Matsuo Basho's last haiku:
http://www.herondance.org/sounding-tapsVisit here for August posts.
Respect the common things. They are common because they survived.
- John C. Gifford, Living by the Land
Also Jiro Harada on a Japanese concept of the beauty in common things, and plans for the evolving Heron Dance and Pause For Beauty:
http://www.herondance.org/common-thingsVisit here for August posts.
The story of an old sailor who traveled the world's oceans in a beat up old boat that didn't even have a head (bathroom). It's long, but it's a beauty. By Elliott Merrick.
http://www.herondance.org/sails-furledVisit here for August posts.
Some paths give you energy,
Some take it away.
Some people, some relationships add to your energy. . .
Energy seeks out Channels
For Its Growth.
Participate in that
Seek Paths, And people
Where Energy Grows.
For more on energy paths:
http://www.herondance.org/energy-pathVisit here for August posts.
To Wei Pa, A Retired Scholar
The lives of many men are
Shorter than the years since we have
Seen each other. Aldebaran
And Antares move as we have.
And now, what night is this? We sit
Here together in the candle
Light. How much longer will our prime
Last? Our temples are already
Grey. I visit my old friends.
Half of them have become ghosts. . .
- Tu Fu, One Hundred Poems Of The Chinese
For more of Tu Fu's poem on reuniting with an old friend:
http://www.herondance.org/schoolboysVisit here for August posts.
"You man come 'lone?"
Again I answered "Yes."
"I don't believe that. You had other mans, and you eat 'em."
At this sally the others laughed. "What for you come long way?" they asked.
To hear you ladies sing," I replied.
- from The Voyages of Joshua Slocum, a book published in 1899For more from Slocum:
http://www.herondance.org/slocumVisit here for August posts.
To not only look, but see.
To not only hear, but listen.
There’s power in that
Deep medicine
Deep medicine in taking time,
and slowing down.
Listen, see, think.
Be receptive
messages are out there
Waiting to come in.
Anything You give your heart to
Is worthy of time.
Love takes time.
- Roderick MacIver, A Reflection Inspired
By The Work Of Rick Rubin
For the reading that inspired this reflection by Georgia O'Keefe, Rick Rubin, Somerset Maugham, Frederick Franck (Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
http://www.herondance.org/rubinVisit here for August posts.
There are many pathways in this life and it doesn't matter which one you take, for they all have a common destination, and that is the grave. But some paths give you energy and some take it away.
- Cervantes
For more reflections on energy, and how it grows or dissipates:
http://www.herondance.org/paths-energyVisit here for August posts.
There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give those who listen to the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep cleaning the mirror.
- John Coltrane interviewed by Nat Hentoff, 1966. From the liner notes to the album Meditations
For more from John Coltrane on trying to capture the essence of music, and of beauty, and Andrew Wyeth on trying to capture the essence of purity:
http://www.herondance.org/essenceVisit here for August posts.
I shall never forget when I was questioning a Bushmen very deeply about the meaning of a story and he said to me, “It is very difficult, because there is a dream dreaming us...”
- Laurens van der Post, The Heart of the Hunter
For more from Laurens Van Der Post on the dream of the Kalahari Bushmen, and Ira Progoff on the dream of the acorn, Sam Write on Koviashuktok, the inner dream of the Eskimo, E.B. White on Thoreau's dream, Garrison Keillor on dreams in Lake Wobegon and Sigurd Olson on the importance of dreams:
http://www.herondance.org/dreamingVisit here for August posts.
While it is not difficult to appreciate that large, powerful fliers such as geese, swans, cranes and even ducks and shorebirds can make intercontinental flights, it is not quite so easy to comprehend that this twice-yearly routine is also followed by small birds such as sparrows and finches. As for hummingbirds — such tiny scraps of life and tied to a lifestyle that requires frequent energy-rich meals — it seems inconceivable. . . Rufus hummingbirds nesting along the southern coast of Alaska regularly spend the winter in Mexico, some 2,000 miles away: a few stay in the very south of Texas and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The calliope hummingbird travels much the same route and, at 0.1 ounce is the smallest long-distance migrant in the bird world.
- Robert Burton, The World of the Hummingbird
For more from Burton on the incredible world of hummingbirds, and Rabindranath Tagore on color and music:
http://www.herondance.org/hummingbirdVisit here for August posts.
Sing us the song Only you can sing. That's what we need from you. Sing us your song within Your unique song (Your courage will give us courage To sing our own song within). For more on a new series of Heron Dance posters (currently in the works) and the inspiration behind them: www.herondance.org/magnificent-struggle
Visit here for August posts.
I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
- excerpted from Thomas Merton’s essay, Rain and the Rhinoceros
For more Rain and the Rhinocerous:
http://www.herondance.org/merton-rainVisit here for August posts.
There is a holy aspect to the descent into your creative realm. When we engage in the creative process, we explore territory just on the edge of understanding.
- Journal Note
For more journal notes on the relationship between creativity and holy realms, Beth Archer on poets as maniacs, William Stafford's poem "When I Met My Muse", and Christopher Morley and Walt Whitman on similar subjects:
http://www.herondance.org/museVisit here for August posts.
Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shadows,
northern Rockies.
- from Gary Snyder's poem, For All.
For more of "For All", and Charles Baudelaire on forests as both physical and spiritual:
http://www.herondance.org/heart-musicVisit here for August posts.
We must realize that there are entities called adepts or Masters or angels or archangels -- the heavenly hosts -- who surround us. They are attempting to help us by pouring out their energies and their knowledge and their wisdom. An angel is literally a messenger from God, trying to give messages to the human race through energies that we are able to receive into our consciousness by turning a dial on our interior radio set. We can turn the dial merely by thinking clearly.
- Willie Nelson, Willie: An Autobiography.
For more from Willie, and G.K. Chesterton on our obligation to each other:
http://www.herondance.org/willieVisit here for August posts.
Two Chinese artists, one a realist, the other an impressionist, are commissioned by the emperor to produce paintings showing the thousand miles of the Kialing River. One strives to capture objective reality; the other the essential nature of things.
For the story, and Laozi's reflection on the nature of nature:
http://www.herondance.org/two-chinese-artistsVisit here for August posts.
“I learned a lot of things walking to the magnetic north pole. I learned trust. . . I encountered polar bears seven times on the trip. There were times that I wondered if I would survive, but then I would think, ‘You know, I have learned all I can. I have done my best. I have survived so far. I have confidence in my ability to do what I have been taught to do. Why not keep it up?’ You want to always know that there will be another polar bear encounter, and that is fine. You will live through it and go to the next one.
- Helen Thayer, former Olympic athlete who walked alone to the North Pole. Heron Dance interview.
For more from my interview of Helen, and Gary Snyder on why adventurers do it:
http://www.herondance.org/trust-oneselfVisit here for August posts.
My Symphony
To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.
- William Henry Channing
And Jean Cocteau on the moment is the only thing that counts:
http://www.herondance.org/unbiddenVisit here for August posts.
In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard wrote: “I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and sea – and to temper my spirit on their edges.” While rambling through the Green Mountains, I graze the forest for whatever morsels of insight come my way. Forest ecology is a straightforward study; casual observations of animal behavior rarely illuminate; the linear trail underfoot offers few profound realizations. But every once in a while something happens, something appears out of the corner of the eye, providing an opportunity to see through the mundane. It’s nothing less than a glimpse of undiluted reality, a flash of the divine. At such times, I pay careful attention. I try to grasp the full significance of the encounter but that’s extremely difficult to do. More often than not, the divine eludes me.
- Walt McLaughlin, Forest Under My Fingernails
For more from "Forest Under My Fingernails"and Christopher Morley on the vibrations of beauty:
http://www.herondance.org/undiluted-realityVisit here for August posts.
Thoughts from Christopher Morley and Thoreau on laziness. http://www.herondance.org/laziness
Visit here for August posts.
She's a quiet clapper in the bell of the prairie,
a girl who likes to be alone.
Today, she's hiked four miles down
ravines' low cool blueness.
Bending under a barbed wire, she's in grass fields.
She's at the edge of the great plains.
Wise to openness, she finds it a similar place.
Her clothes swell like wheat bread.
- Margaret Hasse, from the poem Being Still.
For the rest of Margaret Hasse's poem "Being Still", and John Muir on the question at the center of his life:
http://www.herondance.org/immense-vocabularyVisit here for August posts.
An important task of strategic questioning is to create an environment where people can see the solutions that are within themselves.
- Fran Peavey, “Heart Politics Revisited", a book she describes as "a book which incorporates the experience of 25 years of activism."
For more from Tony Robbins on the hidden questions at the center of our lives, Fran Peavey on strategic questioning, Carolyn Cottom on "Love Changes Things: Even in the World of Politics", and John Woolman on the questions that led to the end of slavery among Quakers a hundred years before the Civil War:
http://www.herondance.org/quality-questionsVisit here for August posts.
Observers in the full enjoyment of their bodily senses pity me, but it is because they do not see the golden chamber in my life where I dwell delighted; for, dark as my path may seem to them, I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one ...
- Hellen Keller, Midstream, My Later Life.
For more from U Thant, Helen Keller and Joseph Campbell on the "Grail Castle" of one's inner sanctum:
http://www.herondance.org/inner-golden-chamberVisit here for August posts.
Jung called coincidence "synchronicity" and it happens to us all if we are only aware. Co-incidence--happening with. You must be ready to see it and do more than say "wow" when you do. To pluck a plum when you pass beneath the bough, you've got to be looking up. To catch the glisten of the green snail beneath the plum tree, you must regard the ground. To capture more good than bad, you scan the whole and, mantis like, snatch the happy moment before it springs away, out of reach.
- Robert Michael Pyle, "Wintergreen: Listening to the Land's Heart"
For more from Robert Michael Pyle on the nature of optimism, and Robert Henri on happiness:
http://www.herondance.org/synchronicityVisit here for August posts.
It is hard to feel affection for something as totally impersonal as the atmosphere, and yet there it is, as much a part and product of life as wine or bread. Taken all in all, the sky is a miraculous achievement. It works and for what it is designed to accomplish it is as infallible as anything in nature. I doubt whether any of us could think of a way to improve on it, beyond maybe shifting a local cloud from here to there on occasion. The word "chance" does not serve to account well for structures of such magnificence. There may have been elements of luck in the emergence of chloroplasts, but once these things were on the scene, the evolution of the sky became absolutely ordained. Chance suggests alternatives, other possibilities, different solutions. This may be true for gills and swim bladders and forebrains, matters of detail, but not for the sky. There was simply no other way to go.
We should credit it for what it is for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.
- Lewis Thomas, "The World's Biggest Membrane".
For more from Lewis Thomas on the world's biggest membrane, and Emerson on wisdom:
http://www.herondance.org/sky-collaborationVisit here for August posts.