Light of Skye

 "The light of love, the purity of grace,
The mind, the Music breathing from her face,
The heart whose softness harmonised the whole —
And, oh! that eye was in itself a Soul!"

- Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)

Postscript. As photo-safari opportunities have dwindled (and though I do have a growing backlog of house-studio-facilitated abstracts to work on, as time permits), much of my "photo time" nowadays consists of discovering and reworking old images. This one is from the summer of 2009, captured during the first trip my wife and I took to Scotland; specifically, South Ronaldsay, one of the preternaturally beautiful Orkney Islands off Scotland's northeastern coast. The light there, as in all of Scotland, is not entirely of this world!

Centering

"To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place. In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable."

- Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 - 1961)
Markings 

Living Mirror

 "This interconnection or
accommodation of all
created things to each other,
and each to all the others,
brings it about that each
simple substance has relations
that express all the others,
and consequently, that
each simple substance
is a perpetual,
living mirror of
the universe."

- G.W. Leibniz (1646 - 1716)
Monadology

Waves

 "You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way
that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Vibrant Hum

"At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep - just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is."

- Annie Dillard ()
Teaching a Stone to Talk

Subterranean Stream

"The landscape of my days

appears to be composed,

like mountainous regions,

of varied materials

heaped up pell-mell.

There I see my nature,

itself composite,

made up of equal parts

of instinct and training.

Here and there protrude

the granite peaks of

the inevitable, but all

about is rubble from

the landslips of chance.

I strive to retrace my life

to find in it some plan,

following a vein of lead,

or of gold, or the

course of some

subterranean stream,

but such devices

are only tricks

of perspective

in the memory."

- Marguerite Yourcenar (1903 - 1987)
Memoirs of Hadrian

Vibrations

"The infinite vibratory levels,
the dimensions of interconnectedness
are without end.
There is nothing independent.
All beings and things are
residents in your awareness."

- Alex Grey (1953 - )