"Love is a young green willow

shimmering at the bare wood's edge."

"willow dieties"  dlb photography
digital, black and white, 2008

    The Invitation
    by Oriah Mountain Dreamer



    It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

    It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

    It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

    I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

    It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

    I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.

    I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"

    It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

    It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

    It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

    I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments. 

Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.

I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into silence.
O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!

That is why, when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine

that geysers flooding from deep in its vault;
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock & scald.


Pablo Neruda

“Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.”

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh," he whispered.

"Yes, Piglet?"

"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw, "I just wanted to be sure of you.""

"I cannot even imagine where I would be today were it not for that handful of friends who have given me a heart full of joy. Let's face it, friends make life a lot more fun."

“... joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”  Kahil Gibran

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

“You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”
W.Pooh

There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.

"father~daughter"  dlb photography

"Help someone who can't return the favor."

"helping hand" 

"Touch us gently, Time! Let us glide down thy stream, Gently, - as we sometimes glide Through a quiet dream. B.C.

"floating" dlb

"Judge a person by their questions, rather than their answers.” Voltaire

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on an early spring day, listening to the wind, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time”

solvitur ambulando

it is solved by walking

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"When you are describing A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things With a sort of mental squint" Lewis Carroll

"I don't believe in astrology- of course, that's very typical of Leos."
"soushine"  dlb photography

Sunrise
 
 
 You can
die for it-
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

Mary Oliver

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
e. e. cummings

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Mark Twain

Thank you one and all for making the Four Seasons Exhibit in Boston an enchanting success!

“You got to do more than just live in the country to be a Farmer.”

"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring."
"blithe spirit" dlb photography

"Coffee should be black as night, hot as love, and as sweet or bitter as life itself"