There is, I believe, a responsibility to bear witness to damaged beauty and to be honest with ourselves about the gulf that we must continue to bridge between true knowledge and image. Turning away in fear will make our worlds small, our empathy limited, and our sense of beauty rigid and impoverished.

I recently saw Joseph Eid’s photograph of Mahammed Mohiedin Anis sitting in his bombed-out bedroom in Aleppo, listening to music on his gramophone amidst dust and rubble. “He is so attached to his past and to the things that he always cherished and loved,”Eid said. “Without them, he will lose his identity.” Might it be the same for us, when it comes to natural beauty? Might we lose ourselves if we were to stop cherishing the places we loved, the places that made us, even if they are not as pristine as they once were?

Natural beauty may be in a limited state, but it is persistent, dogged. Even as seas and temperatures rise and species are lost, beauty will break free and make itself known. It does not require material objects to exist; it can also exist in the spiritual realm, or in the realm of action.

~Megan Mayhew Bergman

did you linger in the big moonlight? did you long for the dark shadows?

inquiry for today~   what kind of trail will you leave behind? will it continue from what you’ve followed?

linger in soul

One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts. We should never forget that death is waiting for us. A man in Connemara said one time to a friend of mine, ‘Beidh muid sínte siar,’ a duirt sé, ‘cúig mhilliúin blain déag faoin chré’ – We’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years, and we have a short exposure. I feel that when you recognize that death is on its way, it is a great liberation, because it means that you can in some way feel the call to live everything that is within you. One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become chief executive of the project you call your life, to have a reverence always for the immensity that is inside of you.

~John O’Donohue