Knowing Yourself and Patience

The more you know yourself,
the more patience you have for what you see in others.

Erik Erikson

Michigan, early autumn

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Gift from Athena

Athena sent them a favorable wind, a strong-blowing West wind that sang over the wine dark sea.
The Odyssey

 

Summer musings on a gray November day:  one of Michigan’s inland “seas,” Lake Michigan, the dunes that line her leeward shore, and the visitors who play there at the invitation of  warm temperatures and blue skies.

Warren Dunes and Lake Michigan

A World in a….Drop of Water

This day, in 1757, William Blake was born

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
—William Blake

Or, he might have said, in a drop of water, suspended in time on its path  between underground springs and the great river which is its destiny.

Iargo Springs, Michigan

Sunday Camus: “Awaken that Light”

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

uotes Fleming Creek, Michigan

Art of Overlooking

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

—William James

A quote that now holds personal meaning for me, as James suggests we choose not to respond to most negativity, either in our present or stored in the attic of  the past.

Newburgh Lake, Michigan

Time Is Like a Fashionable Host

For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand
And with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles
And farewell goes out sighing.

Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

Where Dusk is a Sheltering Cloak

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs:
Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
–Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses

On the shore of  a Northern lake, the lingering dusk is a sheltering cloak, an invitation
to contemplation. 

Hartwick Pines, Michigan