by ruralpearl | Oct 12, 2012 | Inspiration
Atchison County, KS, Jan. 2012
I started out my morning run on the river levy with a sighting of two bald eagles flying along the river. The sky was pretty dark grey which I’ll admit to loving in the autumn. It really brings out the vibrance of the leaves on the trees whose branches are a bit more exposed and creaky in the wind. For some reason, it feels like I’m standing inside a warm memory out there amongst them. There was an area of maple trees beaming their bright reds and purples. I wanted to climb in and never come out.. A little over a mile in, I spotted another bald eagle fly in from the field to my left and over the tree line on my right toward the river. I whispered for it to come back.. and sure enough, about two miles in, it emerged from the trees and flew ahead of me along the trail for about 50 yards before going back into the trees. I stopped where I saw it fly in and it flew out again and hovered above me momentarily before making it’s way to the other side of the river. I watched it through a break in the trees as it landed on a branch above the water. I had been feeling a little sluggish this morning, and that gave me all the energy I needed to continue on my way. I also had a brief conversation with a wolf spider who I stopped for as it was crossing the trail (I’ve reconciled my relationship with spiders), and came up with two more ideas for paper cuttings.. or I should say, they were inspired by the morning. Happy Friday.
UPDATE: I took particular notice of the back of the spider because it looked rather spiny looking — almost like a tiny furry pine cone or something.. and with a little research on the ol’ interwebs, I found out that the spider that I saw is called a “rabid wolf spider” and her back looked spiny because she was carrying her babies on it. Cool.
by ruralpearl | Oct 11, 2012 | Inspiration
I had a pretty sleepless night trying to pull all my materials and information together for my 2011 taxes. It was really, really easy to put it off for the last nine months.. and I put it off til the very last minute. And I had to get it in to my accountant first thing this morning an hour away in my hometown. And that didn’t stop me from taking the backroads to get there. Love me some gravel roads. Everybody that you pass waves. Sometimes there’s a tractor moving slow. Sometimes there’s a cow in the road. You just gotta go with the flow. It’s pretty great to be out there surrounded by sky, fields, trees, birds, and nary a soul trying to pass you because you’re driving slow trying to snap pics out the window. There’s nothing superficial out there at all, and that’s one thing in abundance in this world that I try to steer clear of the most. “Forgive me pretty baby, but I always take the long way home” –in the words of Tom Waits.
The trees are approaching their peak of autumn color (tho you can’t really tell from this picture.. pardon my flash reflection in my car window — didn’t know it was on). This is one of my favorite spots on the drive — it’s a small area of trees but looks like a dense forest out of a fairy tale when you’re looking straight into it.
And I couldn’t go to my hometown without paying my cat a visit.. and then I took a catnap before driving home after having a hearty breakfast with my madre. This rose caught my attention as I was getting into my car. It’s just growing in the middle of the yard.
The end.
Endnote: Thank you to you folks who read this blog. I haven’t been doing much paper cutting as I’ve been trying to get lots of other looming things out of the way (like taxes, etc…). Working my way back into to a regular ‘cutting’ routine. Til next time..
by ruralpearl | Oct 10, 2012 | Inspiration
“Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” -Rabindranath Tagore
by ruralpearl | Oct 9, 2012 | Inspiration
Photo by Neal, St. Louis, 2012
And again, a poem for everything (originally found in “A Path With Heart” by Jack Kornfield)
Now I Become Myself
By May Sarton
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before–”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
by ruralpearl | Oct 8, 2012 | Inspiration
“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.” -Elbert Hubbard
by ruralpearl | Oct 8, 2012 | Inspiration, Photos
Sunday was a little warmer and before heading home from Atchison, I took a little excursion out into the countryside to find some hedgeapples to autumn-up my front porch. And of course, I took my camera…
by ruralpearl | Oct 7, 2012 | Inspiration, Photos
Rural Atchison County, KS, Oct. 5, 2012
Waiting Afield at Dusk
By Robert Frost
What things for dream there are when spectre-like,
Moving among tall haycocks lightly piled,
I enter alone upon the stubble field,
From which the laborers’ voices late have died,
And in the antiphony of afterglow
And rising full moon, sit me down
Upon the full moon’s side of the first haycock
And lose myself amid so many alike.
I dream upon the opposing lights of the hour,
Preventing shadow until the moon prevail;
I dream upon the night-hawks peopling heaven,
Each circling each with vague unearthly cry,
Or plunging headlong with fierce twang afar;
And on the bat’s mute antics, who would seem
Dimly to have made out my secret place,
Only to lose it when he pirouettes,
And seek it endlessly with purblind haste;
On the last swallow’s sweep; and on the rasp
In the abyss of odor and rustle at my back,
That, silenced by my advent, finds once more,
After an interval, his instrument,
And tries once–twice–and thrice if I be there;
And on the worn book of old-golden song
I brought not here to read, it seems, but hold
And freshen in this air of withering sweetness;
But on the memory of one absent most,
For whom these lines when they shall greet her eye.
by ruralpearl | Oct 5, 2012 | Inspiration
I just barely caught it — had to go to the highest point on the hilliest gravel road I know, and I only had about 2 minutes left..
by ruralpearl | Oct 4, 2012 | Inspiration
I’ve been having a continuous dialog with one of my oldest friends, who, in a nutshell, is beginning down a new path of self-discovery. I picked up a book sitting on my coffee table this morning and opened it to a random page to see what would jump out at me, and this is what I read and ended up sending to her. I think it’s worth sharing. From “Practical Mysticism” by Evelyn Underhill (read the full book online here: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/underhill/practical).
So, in a measure, you have found yourself: have retreated behind all that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness with its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest and apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the psychologists mistake for You. Thanks to this recollective act, you have discovered in your inmost sanctuary a being not wholly practical, who refuses to be satisfied by your busy life of correspondences with the world of normal men, and hungers for communion with a spiritual universe. And this thing so foreign to your surface consciousness, yet familiar to it and continuous with it, you recognise as the true Self whose existence you always took for granted, but whom you have only known hitherto in its scattered manifestations. “That art thou.”
This climb up the mountain of self-knowledge, said the Victorine mystics, is the necessary prelude to all illumination. Only at its summit do we discover, as Dante did, the beginning of the pathway to Reality. It is a lonely and an arduous excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to dwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there to make of their more obvious characteristics a drapery which shall veil the naked truth. True and complete self-knowledge, indeed, is the privilege of the strongest alone. Few can bear to contemplate themselves face to face; for the vision is strange and terrible, and brings awe and contrition in its wake. The life of the seer is changed by it for ever. He is converted, in the deepest and most drastic sense; is forced to take up a new attitude towards himself and all other things. Likely enough, if you really knew yourself—saw your own dim character, perpetually at the mercy of its environment; your true motives, stripped for inspection and measured against eternal values; your unacknowledged self-indulgences; your irrational loves and hates—you would be compelled to remodel your whole existence, and become for the first time a practical man.
But you have done what you can in this direction; have at last discovered your own deeper being, your eternal spark, the agent of all your contacts with Reality. You have often read about it. Now you have met it; know for a fact that it is there. What next? What changes, what readjustments will this self-revelation involve for you?
by ruralpearl | Oct 4, 2012 | Inspiration, Photos
I took a break from work last evening and sipped some hot tea on my deck while watching my local squirrels skitter around. I’m making a point to take full advantage of these autumn evenings before it’s too cold.. And of course, there’s a poem to go with everything:
To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-No
by William Butler Yeats
Come play with me;
Why should you run
Through the shaking tree
As though I’d a gun
To strike you dead?
When all I would do
Is to scratch your head
And let you go.
