Transcendent Patterns

"To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in."

- Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)

Secrets of the Trees

"If you reveal your secrets to the wind,
you should not blame the wind for
revealing them to the trees."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931) 
The Wanderer

Soft Stillness and the Night

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

- William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
The Merchant of Venice

Imperfect Concepts

"To Taoism that which is absolutely still

or absolutely perfect is absolutely dead,

for without the possibility of growth
and change there can be no Tao. In
reality there is nothing in the universe which
is completely perfect or completely still;
it is only in the minds of men
that such concepts exist."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Nature's Elegance

"But nature is always more subtle,
more intricate, more
elegant than what
we are able to
imagine."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
The Demon-Haunted World

Making Visible the Invisible

"The world is filled with these
invisible islands of energy,
where certain things can happen
and certain emotions and
dreams can be transported.
And as a photographer,
my task is to find those places.

...

Photography for me is not looking,
it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what
you’re looking at, then
you’re never going to get
others to feel anything when
they look at your pictures.

...

The camera is a tool for
making visible the invisible."

- Fay Godwin (1931 - 2005)

Musical Imagination

"Perception is never purely in the present,

it has to draw on experience of the past;
We all have detailed memories of how
things have previously looked and sounded,
and these memories are recalled are
admixed with every new perception.

...

Music can also evoke worlds

very different from the personal,

remembered worlds of events,

people, places we have known.

...

Every act of perception, is
to some degree an act of creation, and
every act of memory is to some
degree an act of imagination."

- Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)
Musicophilia