Temporarily Identifiable Wiggles

“A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.”

- Alan Watts

(1915 - 1973)

Swirls, Whorls, and Tendrils

"Big whorls have little whorls

Which feed on their velocity,

And little whorls have lesser whorls

And so on to viscosity."

- Lewis Fry Richardson (1881 - 1953)

Weather Prediction by Numerical Process

Postscript: additional images from this series

Aeons of Creation

"The dawn wind in the High Sierra is not just a passage of cool air through forest conifers, but within the labyrinth of human consciousness becomes a stirring of some world-magic of most delicate persuasion. The grand lift of the Tetons is more than a mechanistic fold and faulting of the earth's crust; it becomes a primal gesture of the earth beneath a greater sky. And on the ancient Acadian coast an even more ancient Atlantic surge disputes the granite headlands with more than the slow, crumbling erosion of the seas. Here are forces familiar with the aeons of creation, and with the aeons of the ending of the world."

- Ansel Adams

(1902 - 1984)

Mystery and Awe

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.” 

- Richard Feynman

(1918-1988)

Continuity in Space

"We go all the way back to the first universal sensation that our spirit can already perceive thanks to the extremely intense synthesis of all the senses in a universal whole which will make us return through and beyond our millennial complexity, to primordial simplicity."

"It is achieved through

the intuitive search

for the one single form

which produces continuity in space."

- Umberto Boccioni

(1882 - 1916)

Pictures of the Soul

"At different moments you 

see with different eyes. 

You see differently in the morning 

than you do in the evening. 

In addition, how you see is also 

dependent on your emotional state. 

Because of this, a motif can be seen 

in many different ways,

 and this is what makes art interesting." 

"Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye —

it also includes the inner pictures of the soul."

- Edvard Munch

(1863 - 1944)

Your Own Self

"Whether you are going or staying

or sitting or lying down, 

the whole world is your own self. 

You must find out

whether the mountains, rivers,

grass, and forests 

exist in your own mind

or exist outside it. 

Analyze the ten thousand things, 

dissect them minutely, 

and when you take this to the limit 

you will come to the limitless, 

when you search into it you come

to the end of search, 

where thinking goes no further

and distinctions vanish. 

When you smash the citadel of doubt, 

then the Buddha is simply yourself." 

- Lanxi Daolong 

(c. 1213-1278)