Sunday Dinner: Seeing What There Is to See

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“Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book

which ever is before our eyes –

– I mean the universe –

– but we cannot understand it

if we do not first learn the language

and grasp the symbols in which it is written.

The book is written in mathematical language,

and the symbols are triangles,

circles and other geometrical figures,

without whose help it is impossible to comprehend

a single word of it;

without which one wanders in vain

through a dark labyrinth.”

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Galileo Galilei

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“In the various arts,

and above all in that of writing,

the shortest distance between two points,

even if close to each other,

has never been and never will be,

nor is it now, what is known as a straight line,

never, never, to put it strongly

and emphatically in response to any doubts,

to silence them once and for all.”

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Jose Saramago

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“His way had therefore come full circle,

or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral,

following as ever no straight unbroken line,

for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry

and not to Nature and Life.”

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Hermann Hesse,

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“The brain does not own any direct copies

of stuff in the world.

There is no library of forms and ideas

against which to compare the images of perception.

Information is stored in a plastic way,

allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination.

Some chaos exists out there,

and the brain seems to have more flexibility

than classical physics

in finding the order in it.”

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James Gleick

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“Give me a place to stand,

a lever long enough and a fulcrum.

and I can move the Earth”

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Archimedes

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“The pits and tangles are more

than blemishes distorting the classic shapes

of Euclidian geometry.

They are often the keys

to the essence of a thing”

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James Gleick

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“Maths is at only one remove from magic.”

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Neel Burton

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2019

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“That’s the thing about magic;

you’ve got to know it’s still here,

all around us,

or it just stays invisible for you.”

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Charles de Lint

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WPC: Favorite Place

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My favorite place is one of magic and mystery, comfort, peace and ever expanding potential.

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It changes minute to minute, day to day.  Yet it always remains constant in its beauty.

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There are infinite layers to this place.  What the eye can see, and what the camera perceives, are sometimes different.

The air is filled with song from creatures seen and unseen.

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And the light infuses all. 

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Photos By Woodland Gnome 2018

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For the Daily Post’s

Weekly Photo Challenge:  Favorite Place

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Within the mystery of life

there is the infinite darkness of the night sky

lit by distant orbs of fire,

the cobbled skin of an orange that releases its fragrance to our touch,

the unfathomable depths of the eyes of our lover.

No creation story, no religious system

can fully describe or explain this richness and depth.

Mystery is so every-present

that no one can know for certain

what will happen one hour from now. 

It does not matter whether you have religion

or are an agnostic believe in nothing,

You can only appreciate

(without knowing or understanding)

the mysteries of life.

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Jack Kornfield

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“Those loving and most loved lights do not leave this world.  They remain among us, the stuff of sunbeams and whispers; always as close as thought, as real as dream.  Light and love bind us one to another, beyond the bounds of space and time. ” WG

Sunday Dinner: New Horizons

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“When we look up, it widens our horizons.

We see what a little speck we are in the universe,

so insignificant, and we all take ourselves so seriously,

but in the sky, there are no boundaries.

No differences of caste or religion or race.”

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Julia Gregson

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“There is so much to say about a past.

It’s a vein of gold through a mountain,

leading to an incontrovertible stone heart of truth.

But the future is a horizon –

a faintly visible line that will promise much,

and always remain too far away to touch.”

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Aliya Whiteley

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“Watching the infinite horizons

gives you infinite dreams, infinite ideas,

infinite paths!

Choose a great target

and then you will see

that great instruments will appear for you

to reach that target!”

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Mehmet Murat ildan

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“Material and technical changes

are mostly quite visible.

But less visible are the changes

in the mind of the people, their way of thinking,

their conception of the world

and the quality of their fears.”

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Erik Pevernagie

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“Dreamers are mocked as impractical.

The truth is they are the most practical,

as their innovations lead to progress

and a better way of life for all of us.”

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Robin S. Sharma

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“In a world of change,

the learners shall inherit the earth,

while the learned shall find themselves

perfectly suited for a world

that no longer exists.”

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Eric Hoffer

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2017

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“We’re treating the sky as an open sewer.”

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“Every night on the news

is like a nature hike

through the book of Revelation.”

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“Now we have solutions to the climate crisis,

and they can create tens of millions of new jobs.” 

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Al Gore on CNN’s ‘State of The Union,’ June 4, 2017

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WPC: Morning

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For the Daily Posts

Weekly Photo Challenge:  Morning

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2016

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WPC: Circle

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This remains one of my favorite photos taken last year.  It was taken last January 30 from the deck behind our home, when I’d come out to watch the sun set.  The moon put on a show again last week when we enjoyed the full moon for Christmas.  It was especially close and bright, filling the sky with bright light on Christmas Eve and Christmas night.

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These favorite photos of the Moon and Sun seem especially appropriate for the photo challenge this week of  “Circle,”   as they also rule the cycles of our planet’s sky and climate.  The ‘wheel of the year’ turns continually as an ever- present rhythm in our lives.

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We’ve just passed our Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and the days have begun to grow again by a minute or so each day.  We have reached, and passed, one of the main turning points of our year.  Even as our days now grow longer, they will also grow colder as we climb back towards the Equinox next March.  These photos were taken December 11, 2014,  just days before the Winter Solstice.

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We had stopped to photograph this elegant grouping of trees, and stayed to witness the sun setting in the afternoon sky.

Circles , cycles, spheres and spirals offer comfort and companionship along our life time’s journey.  Perhaps you also hold memories close of special sunrises and moon-rises, sunsets and balmy full-moon nights.  Perhaps you also mark the equinoxes and solstices as we do, marking the turnings of the each passing year.

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We hold this common thread with all of our ancestors; this sky watching and marking of time.  We find the circles of standing stones they left for us; their observatories of standing stones used also to measure cosmic time by the stars and planets.

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We look upon the same Sun and the same Moon as they watched.  The same Sun and Moon we watched as children, and that our loved ones see no matter how far away their homes.  Another circle, perhaps?  These are constants in an ever-changing world.

We watch Venus trace a pentagram across the sky in her years long wandering as she shifts from the Morning Star to the Evening Star.  We watch for Mighty Orion to march across the night time sky, and wonder if the stories of bright Sirius might be true….

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Circles and cycles.  As Above, so Below….   These familiar lights still have much to teach us as we unravel their mysteries.

May this New Year, just beginning, bring you happiness, and wisdom too.

Finding ourselves beginning another January, we remember Janus, the one with two faces, who looks both ahead and behind.  This ancient Roman God watched over arrivals and departures, beginnings and endings.

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As we look ahead, we also look behind at the path we’ve followed which brought us to this place and time.

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Woodland Gnome 2016

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For the Daily Post’s 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Circle

WPC: Rainbow Light

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Life is such a mystery.  There is the unknown, and there is the unknowable.

And our awareness sways back and forth between what we don’t yet know, and what we believe we can not know, throughout our lives.

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Life is vibrating energy. 

And most of us come to understand that energy expresses itself as light.

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The rainbow light of living beings was understood many thousands of years ago, and some preserve that knowledge, still.

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Day to day, we may not think about it too much.

There’s coffee to brew, weeds to pull, pots to water, friends to call and meals to prepare.  The TV may hypnotize us.  We get lost in our thoughts while navigating traffic.

Yet the mystery remains, always there, like the sea.

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Waves of light roll across us continually; our vision often limited by our consciousness.  We may feel it, we may see it; we may not consciously recognize it at all.

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But a digital camera can capture what our eye may miss.  I noticed first one orb, and then another on the screen of my little Nikon today.

My eye could not see them unaided, though I felt them gathering there.

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Such exquisite beauty.  Such soft and silent energy gathering, revealing themselves little by little.

These light beings gathered around our Adam’s Needle, Yucca filamentosa, as I was working around this little garden space this morning.

When I stopped to capture the beauty of the Yucca’s unfolding flowers, I saw the hint of the first at the bottom of that photo.  I took a total of 17 photos over the space of a little more than ten minutes.

From a single orb in the first photo, there are more than a dozen towards the end.

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A rainbow mystery; a gathering of light.

For the Daily Post’s

Weekly Photo Challenge: ROY G. BIV

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2105

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“Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds.

Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies

into which they never enter,

and with their hands on the door-latch

they die outside.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson