All the best to everyone on this passage into the New Year...

( photo by Theta Paranoia )

( painting by Zdzislaw Beksinski )

 ( photo by Jason Cane )

( painting by John Martin )

“The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very” -Thomas Carlyle

 ( painting by Zdzislaw Beksinki )

“Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe.” -John Muir

“Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.” -Charles Baudelaire

 ''The Clearsest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness''. 
   -John Muir     ( photo by Bryan Tulao )

( photo by Terry Marasco )

"It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these western woods ... Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools."
— John Muir
(Photo by Sera-Sequoia National Forest)

 ( Illustration by Theodor Kittelsen )

( photo by Andreas Franke )

“You walk through a series of arches, so to speak, and then, presently, at the end of a corridor, a door opens and you see backward through time, and you feel the flow of time, and realize you are only part of a great nameless procession.” - John Huston
Painting By Ernst Ferdinand Oehme

In that cathedral, in which you were alone, and where you entered to forget the world and yourself, you did it to feel the lack of motion and to forget waiting, to feel how you were solemnly born in the colonnades and in the arches, to feel how you were disseminated in the purple shrouding, the majestically curbed and undulating lines of the temple, whose vaults you measured, and in whose transcen...dental geometry you lost yourself. Your soul has become a column, an arch, and a vault. Above the world and in its forms your forms have been intertwined, and this non-movement of your nature has become a block of stone. And in your bending, without emotion, you have looked down on earth. What was your soul, if not the stone that does not rest on the ground? Down you were in your heights, weak in your toughness, heavy in your flight, stone on its way to heaven… But suddenly, the miracle of the sound of the organ, a miracle in the cathedral in which you thought you were alone. How the arches moved, the colonnades and vaults, and in vibration did your matter dilate itself, and the cathedral grew bigger in the world’s dimensions. In the sound of the organ, where you may still look for boundaries, what music comes from beyond the margins, from beyond the margins of the world and the soul?
- E. M. Cioran




Photo by Eduard Widmer

painting by Zdzislaw Beksinski

( illustration by Albin Brunovsky )

Painting by Carter Hodgkin, ''Unforeseen Behaviors''

''The moon like a flower,
In Heaven's high bower,
With silent delight,
Sit's and smiles on the night''
-William Blake
( painting by Jules Tavernier )

''By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright'' -Edgar Allan Poe
( painting by Alex Gardega, ''Swim to the Moon'' )

“'Tis very puzzling on the brink Of what is called Eternity to stare, And know no more of what is here, than there” -Lord Byron   (painting by Jean Delville )

“All things must change to something new, to something strange.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 
  (painting by Zdzislaw Beksinski )

''Lives in Eternity's sun rise'' -William Blake  ( painting by Florence Harrison )

“Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us” 
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

 ''Whose deepness doth entice forward wits, To practice more than heavenly power permits''
  -Christopher Marlowe  ( painting by John Stark )

“All these things have you said of beauty.

Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,

And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.

It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,

But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.

It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,

But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.

It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,

But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.

But you are life and you are the veil.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

But you are eternity and your are the mirror.” 
-Kahlil Gibran  ( illustration by Dan Hillier )

 

"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do." - Anais Nin (Photo of Maria Germanova 1908 in The Blue Bird)