“What if our religion was each other. If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth. If forests were our church. If holy water–the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships. If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being.”
Sunset Near Tanque Verde Wash (09/15/11) — Image by kenne
Such a beautiful tree — so representative of life. Yet, we often see beauty only in the foliage and blossoms nature provides in one of life’s stages. Why?
Beauty is everywhere — there is beauty in death, marking the stage so important in the cycles of life.
This tree (image of) is amazing, a sculpture in the face of the sun, containing the shapes we use to design our places in this world.
What image do you present in the face of the sun? Does it add? Does it subtract?
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open field, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon, Where you lean against a bank while a van passes, And the deep lane insists on the direction Into the village, in the electric heat Hypnotised.
— from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
Tom’s Signature
Eliot’s Four Quartets rests on my desk not only because I love his poetic masterpiece but because my first copy was given to me by my brother, Tom, who wrote “. . . I’ve become obsessed with it . . . with time . . . with memory . . . with language, all of which are concentrated in this work. It has become such a part of me.”
Tom went on to write — “To use a few of Eliot’s words; ‘As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated . . . ‘ Complications, ambiguities, non sequitur I keep searching for clarity . . . lucidity, and I know each time I seek that, I’ll become more entangled. No. I’m not bored—just Scarred. I’m moving toward a sort-of silence . . . I know what you’re thinking: ‘Bull-shit!’ Since the significant things, I want to say have the wrong inflections, intonations for most arenas of conversation; I ramble on into oblivion. A series of non sequitur.” (7/27/84)
Late yesterday a lot of haze moved in the Tucson basin probably as a result of the Apple Fire burning in the Cherry Valley area east of San Bernadino and south of Big Bear Lake in southern California. This is a sunset image from our patio.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
— from The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens (Click Here To Read The Complete Poem)
I went to the [desert] because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Golden Columbine — Image by kenne
Sunset — Image by kenne
Almost Missed Yesterday’s Sunset — Image by kenne
Gray Skies At Sunset — Image by kenne
Time– Image by kenne
Ensenada Bay Sunset (01/07/07) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Katelyn at Sunset (March 2017) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
The Sea of Cortas — Image by kenne
Baja California Sunset (January 7, 2007) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Catalina Foothills Sunset — Image by kenne
Colorado River Sunset — Photo-Artistry by kenne
March Sonoran Sunset — Photo-Artistry by kenne
