Sunday Dinner: Bittersweet

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“I searched among her crayons for a color that represented autumn and pulled out an orange-toned crayon, never used. It read “Bittersweet,” and I wondered why that particular name. Autumn was my favorite time of year… I was always ready for the change. I guess some people didn’t see it that way. Some people wanted to cling to summer… I loved both seasons, but I thought no one would ever call spring bittersweet, even though it was just another change, another new cycle, an end to one season and a beginning for another in an endless, never-ending spiral.”

Janet Rebhan

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“How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.”

Elizabeth Lesser

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“We have a tendency to become detached observers rather than participants.  There might also be a sense of disassembling a complex, flowing process to focus on a small part of it. If we expand our focus to include emerging, one of the first changes we may notice is the bodily sense of being in the midst of something, of constant motion, lack of clarity (in the left-hemisphere sense), and unpredictability.”

Bonnie Badenoch

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“Light precedes every transition.

Whether at the end of a tunnel, through a crack in the door

or the flash of an idea,

it is always there, heralding a new beginning.”

Teresa Tsalaky

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2020

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“The best part of your story is when it changes.”

Bella Bloom

 

Visit my other site, Illuminations, for a daily quotation and a photo of something beautiful.

 

Sunday Dinner: Resilience

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“A good half of the art of living

is resilience.”

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Alain de Botton

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“No matter how you define success,

you will need to be resilient,

empowered, authentic,

and limber to get there.”

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Joanie Connell

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“I will not be another flower,

picked for my beauty and left to die.

I will be wild,

difficult to find,

and impossible to forget.”

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Erin Van Vuren

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“Never say that you can’t do something,

or that something seems impossible,

or that something can’t be done,

no matter how discouraging

or harrowing it may be;

human beings are limited only

by what we allow ourselves to be limited by:

our own minds.

We are each the masters of our own reality;

when we become self-aware to this:

absolutely anything in the world is possible.

Master yourself,

and become king of the world around you.

Let no odds, chastisement, exile,

doubt, fear, or ANY mental virii

prevent you from accomplishing your dreams.

Never be a victim of life;

be it’s conqueror.”

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Mike Norton

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“to be successful,

you have to be out there,

you have to hit the ground running”

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Richard Branson

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“One’s doing well

if age improves even slightly

one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism:

“This too shall pass.”

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Alain de Botton

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“In the face of adversity,

we have a choice.
We can be bitter, or we can be better.

Those words are my North Star.”

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Caryn Sullivan

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2019

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“Grief and resilience live together.”
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Michelle Obama

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“On the other side of a storm

is the strength

that comes from having navigated through it.

Raise your sail and begin.”

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Gregory S. Williams

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Sunday Dinner: Celebrating Summer

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“It was only a sunny smile,

and little it cost in the giving,

but like morning light it scattered the night

and made the day worth living.”

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“People of our time are losing the power of celebration.

Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained.

Celebration is an active state,

an act of expressing reverence or appreciation.

To be entertained is a passive state-

-it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle….

Celebration is a confrontation,

giving attention

to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.

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Abraham Joshua Heschel

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“And so with the sunshine

and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees,

just as things grow in fast movies,

I had that familiar conviction

that life was beginning over again

with the summer.”

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“To live is to be marked.

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story,

and that is the only celebration

we mortals really know.”

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Barbara Kingsolver

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“Take the time to celebrate stillness and silence

and see the joy that the world can bring,

simply.”

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Tony Curl

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“Shall we walk through the woods;
dance through the meadows;
and celebrate the miracle
of this garden world?”

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Leland Lewis

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“I almost wish we were butterflies

and liv’d but three summer days –

three such days with you

I could fill with more delight

than fifty common years

could ever contain.”

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John Keats

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“Summertime. It was a song.

It was a season.

I wondered if that season

would ever live inside of me.”

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Benjamin Alire Sáenz

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“What life expects of us is that we celebrate.”
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José Eduardo Agualusa

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2019 

from The Williamsburg Botanical Garden and the Colonial Parkway

Sunday Dinner: Bold and Beautiful

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“Maps encourage boldness.

They’re like cryptic love letters.

They make anything seem possible.”

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Mark Jenkins

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“Life isn’t meant to be lived perfectly…

but merely to be LIVED.

Boldly, wildly, beautifully,

uncertainly, imperfectly,

magically LIVED.”

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Mandy Hale

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“Love, like Fortune,

favours the bold.”

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E.A. Bucchianeri

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“They did not know it was impossible,

so they did it.”

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Mark Twain

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“The tiniest of actions

is always better

than the boldest of intentions”

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Robin Sharma

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“Your playing small does not serve the world.

There’s nothing enlightened

about shrinking

so that other people

won’t feel insecure around you.”

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Nelson Mandela

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“Dreams can only become reality

when they are sought after

with the spirit of boldness.”

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Ellen J. Barrier

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“Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise.”

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Horace

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2019

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“I used to be afraid of the dark

until I learned that I am light

and the dark is afraid of me.”

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D.R. Silva

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Sunday Dinner: The Art of Memory

February 2017 Powhatan Creek

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“When people look at my pictures

I want them to feel

the way they do

when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

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Robert Frank

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March 2016

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“The Earth is Art,

The Photographer is only a Witness ”

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Yann Arthus-Bertrand

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April 2018

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“What I like about photographs

is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever,

impossible to reproduce.”

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Karl Lagerfeld

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May 2018

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“When words become unclear,

I shall focus with photographs.

When images become inadequate,

I shall be content with silence.”

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Ansel Adams

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June 2017

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“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely,

every hundredth of a second.”

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Marc Riboud

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July 2018

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“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us

nothing more than what we see with our own eyes,

there is another in which it proves to us

how little our eyes permit us to see.”

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Dorothea Lange

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August 2018

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“To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’

I respond, There are always two people:

the photographer and the viewer.”

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Ansel Adams

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September 2017

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2014-2018

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October 2014

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“Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see,

which is the very reason one should try to attempt it.

Otherwise we’re going to go on forever

just photographing more faces and more rooms

and more places.

Photography has to transcend description.

It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject,

or reveal the subject, not as it looks,

but how does it feel?”
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Duane Michals

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October 2014

Sunday Dinner: Vision

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“While there is perhaps a province

in which the photograph can tell us nothing more

than what we see with our own eyes,

there is another in which it proves to us

how little our eyes permit us to see.”

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Dorothea Lange

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“How you look at it

is pretty much how you’ll see it”

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Rasheed Ogunlaru

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“The power to concentrate was the most important thing.

Living without this power

would be like opening one’s eyes

without seeing anything.”

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Haruki Murakami

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“The more boundless your vision,

the more real you are.”

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Deepak Chopra

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“If the doors of perception were cleansed,

everything would appear to man as it is –

infinite.”

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William Blake

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“Your heart is able to see things

that your eyes aren’t able to.”

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Kholoud Yasser

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“I await your sentence

with less fear than you pass it.

The time will come

when all will see what I see.”

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Giordano Bruno

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“At the moment of vision,

the eyes see nothing.”

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William Golding 

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2014-2019

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“You get what you focus on.”
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Chris Hutchinson

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“After all, … your eyes only see

what your mind lets you believe.”

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Paul Jenkins

 

Sunday Dinner: Observant

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“To acquire knowledge, one must study;
but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.”

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Marilyn vos Savant

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“Have you noticed how nobody ever looks up?

Nobody looks at chimneys, or trees against the sky,

or the tops of buildings.

Everybody just looks down at the pavement or their shoes.

The whole world could pass them by

and most people wouldn’t notice.”

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Julie Andrews Edwards

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“If you want to really know something

you have to observe or experience it in person;

if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay,

or on happening to see it in a book,

you’ll be a laughingstock

to those who really know.”

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Jonathan D. Spence

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For in the sciences

the authority of thousands of opinions

is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.

Besides, the modern observations

deprive all former writers of any authority,

since if they had seen what we see,

they would have judged as we judge.”

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Galileo Galilei

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“Look around you…Feel the wind, smell the air.

Listen to the birds and watch the sky.

Tell me what’s happening in the wide world.”

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Nancy Farmer

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“Reason, Observation and Experience —

the Holy Trinity of Science —

have taught us that happiness is the only good;

that the time to be happy is now,

and the way to be happy is to make others so.

This is enough for us. In this belief

we are content to live and die. ”

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Robert Green Ingersoll

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2019

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“A journey of observation

must leave as much as possible to chance.

Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation”

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Tahir Shah

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“To see

is to forget the name

of the thing one sees.”

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Paul Valéry

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Sunday Dinner: Honestly

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“Integrity is telling myself the truth.

And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”

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Spencer Johnson

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“Patience is the calm acceptance

that things can happen in a different order

than the one you have in mind.”

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David G. Allen

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“Nothing is at last sacred

but the integrity of your own mind.”

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“Listen with curiosity.

Speak with honesty. Act with integrity.

The greatest problem with communication

is we don’t listen to understand.

We listen to reply.

When we listen with curiosity,

we don’t listen with the intent to reply.

We listen for what’s behind the words.”

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Roy T. Bennett

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“Every man must decide

whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism

or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

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“Each of us is an artist of our days;

the greater our integrity and awareness,

the more original and creative our time will become.”

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John O’Donohue

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2019

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“Watch any plant or animal

and let it teach you acceptance of what is,

surrender to the Now.

Let it teach you Being.

Let it teach you integrity — which means to be one,

to be yourself, to be real.

Let it teach you how to live and how to die,

and how not to make living and dying into a problem.”

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Eckhart Tolle

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Sunday Dinner: Gardening

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“If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it,

and understand it in a very real sense.

‘Green fingers’ are a fact,

and a mystery only to the unpracticed.

But green fingers are the extensions

of a verdant heart.”

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Russell Page

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“The green thumb is equable in the face of nature’s uncertainties;

he moves among her mysteries

without feeling the need for control or explanations

or once-and-for-all solutions.

To garden well is to be happy

amid the babble of the objective world,

untroubled by its refusal

to be reduced by our ideas of it,

its indomitable rankness.”

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Michael Pollan

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“It is easier to tell a person what life is not,

rather than to tell them what it is.

A child understands weeds that grow

from lack of attention, in a garden.

However, it is hard to explain the wild flowers

that one gardener calls weeds,

and another considers beautiful ground cover.”

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Shannon L. Alder

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2018

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“It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth,

to feel at one’s fingertips

the possibilities of the new season.”

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Kate Morton

*

With love, to the JCCWMGA Class of 2018

*

 

Sunday Dinner: Finding Peace

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“My country is the world,

and my religion is to do good.”

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Thomas Paine

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“Until he extends the circle of his compassion

to all living things,

man will not himself find peace.”

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Albert Schweitzer

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“Leave behind the passive dreaming

of a rose-tinted future.

The energy of happiness

exists in living today

with roots sunk firmly in reality’s soil.”

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Daisaku Ikeda

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“Can you look

without the voice in your head commenting,

drawing conclusions, comparing,

or trying to figure something out?”

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Eckhart Tolle

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“Peace is present right here and now,

in ourselves and in everything we do and see.

Every breath we take,

every step we take,

can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity.

The question is whether or not

we are in touch with it.

We need only to be awake,

alive in the present moment.”

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Thich Nhat Hanh

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“World peace must develop from inner peace.

Peace is not just mere absence of violence.

Peace is, I think, the manifestation of human compassion.”

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Dali Lama

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2018

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“Let the peace of this day

be here tomorrow when I wake up.”

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Thomas Pynchon

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Photos from Colonial Williamsburg and the Bruton Parish churchyard