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Can You Feel the Silence?
We search for that breath, and its mindfulness. It’s that deep breath that focuses you on the moment, and fills you with calm and quiet. Too often our lives often become cluttered with the earthly grind of work and worry. We all feel some form of its ache. Some of us find the world is a bumpy road. Some of us find it an easy path to navigate, if not a little dusty now and then.
May you have the good fortune, at least once in a while, to find yourself on a summer’s drive to the countryside. A smooth ride on the open road, where you step out of the mundane, and your old coat, and into the mystic. Finding that deep breath that focuses you on the moment, you are there, in the green of summer, in a place that feels holy, and you feel whole. And you listen to the silence. Can you feel the silence?
Happy Birthday, Van Morrison. Thank you for the ride….
Abscission
I see it, a story told in the ephemeral nature of color. It’s impossible not to look, but I close my eyes, and listen. It’s the sound of change. Autumn calling out in its rustling and rain of leaves when the wind blows. I want to remember it. Not just see it, but feel it. On a fall day enveloped in grey mist, a flash of red leaves will interrupt the fog, burning through the space. On a brighter autumn day, sunshine moving through the leaves is as illuminating as enlightenment.
Change is forever our status. Fluidity in time and space, the flow of the circle. We don’t think about change, but sometimes something shakes you into awareness: a birth, a death, or the brief and brilliant leaves coming loose from their branches.
This is part of the cyclical design. Trees are actively cutting off their leaves in a survival process: abscission. As days of autumn fade into cold temps and less sunlight, trees reabsorb nutrients from their leaves. This includes chlorophyll and deprived of it, leafy greenness gives way to color. The leaf shedding allows trees to pull in energy and get through winter. It is a cycle of conservation. And sacrifice. The trees grow new skin over every spot where a leaf once was. The trees will live. The leaves will not, but they are making a grand exit.
Nature shows us tangible, real-time change. Change endlessly seeking balance. Here’s a truth about nature, from the Tao: “heaven and earth are ruthless.” Sometimes brutal. Sometimes bittersweet. Life bulldozes through its bleakness – its broken rocks and its broken hearts and its bankruptcy. It’s a dusty path that leads to more busted rocks and broken hearts. More loss. Loss and gain. Gain too, because it’s a green path as well. Life dances through its brightness – its beauty and its bounty. Hearts and moons waxing to full, emptying, filling. A spectrum from bleak to bright.
Energy is always moving. A seed planted, a harvest reaped. Growth, decay, growth. A mended fence. A broken window. Repair. Despair. Gain. Loss. Life. The ever evolving permutation of things swirling in the yin yang pinwheel. We live, survive, thrive, fail, fly.
There’s a red arrow on the map: You are here on this autumn day. And everything is changing. The leaves animate the space. Vivid. Vibrant. Radiant. For now.
Toni Tan
Rock Your Creativity
Your creativity is an egg. Fragile, evolving.
It requires warmth, incubation, nurturance, and the space to crack out of a seemingly unbreakable shell. Rock it till its ready. Let it out. Repeat.
And you? You are stronger than you think.
~Toni
The photo is from Klaus Enrique’s amazing ‘Arcimboldo’ series.
Remembering 9/11
Last night’s sky.
“The living owe it those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.” – Czeslaw Milosz
New York’s Irish Heart
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day…
Photo: Toni Tan
“Scaffolding” by Seamus Heaney
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me,
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall,
Confident that we have built our wall.
You can this photograph and more of my work on zenfolio
Fog
The fog rolls in over the water, spilling onto the pier. It spreads like thick smoke. More mystical than eerie, I lean in. I find myself lost in it, clouded by it, surrounded by it. Every edge of a safe and familiar corner blurs, disorients. More curious than circumspect, I trust the space. I trust my intuition. With zen navigation, I move through it. The sun insinuates itself, in pursuit of the foggy droplets, at times, piercing the veil. ~Toni
See more of my photography, and purchase prints on Zenfolio
More Light
The Winter Solstice….
In astronomy, the seasons move in celestial cycles. As the earth rotates around the sun, it also spins on its own axis, which tilts towards the plane of its rotation (about 23.5 degrees). The northern hemisphere receives less direct sunlight.
Days of less and less light, moving towards the birth of winter and a new year. The sun appears at its lowest point in the sky, unmoving on the horizon. “Solstice” translates from the Latin “sun” and “standing still”. And in this shift, the northern hemisphere experiences its first moments of winter. And the annual winter solstice begins.
This marks the shortest day. It is also the longest night. After the darkest dark, the sun will again ascend in the northern sky as the days begin to grow longer. It is the Earth returning to light. There will be more light. And more light.
Watch Chris Stevens, in Northern Exposure find light in the darkness with art: Northern Exposure
Take A Pin To Your Ego
Take a pin to your ego.
It’s hot air in an old balloon.
Jung said, There is no coming into consciousness without pain.”
Do it.
You will feel better. We all will feel better.
Adapt
Adapt. Adapt. Adapt.
Steven Hawking said, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
In adapting to the environment, its weirdness becomes normal.
Even immersed in the most difficult of landscapes, we learn to go with the flow — or, um, in this case, the wind.
Watch this short, and brilliant, animation by Robert Loebel. Ha, It will blow you away…
Click here to see the film: WIND
Honor 9/11
Remember who was lost, who was saved, the responders, and the soldiers; who was healed and the still healing…
Love, love and more love.
Water Over Fire 