> get lamp

I'm feeling very strange today. The oddest things seem unspeakably beautiful, worthy of tears, or a sensual response -- things like the shapes of number characters and the designs on playing cards.

We have no image
We're just called the good friends
We call the madmen back
As they fly to the ant hills
We never know, we never know
We sleep in satin nights
Throwing energy like bluebirds
In twilight

We call to stillness
As we kiss the water king's hand
We hear the one same name
As the darker the land gets
We never know, we never know
We're fueling for the light
Cascading like the rain
In twilight

Waiting for you, you look so close, we walk a thousand stairs
Aching for your hand, our love a distant
voice, we have no image - we are light

We are not asking
No favors from the dead
We wash with moonlit hands
On the shores of our island
We never know, we never know
We sleep in satin nights
Throwing energy in silver curves
In twilight

Peter Murphy - "Cascade"

Sandrine Replat

Aboslutely stunning, luminescent art; macabre, spooky, mysterious, atmospheric. I get the feeling even the large images (since they aren't all that large) are completely failing to do the pieces justice. For example:


7th Wind by *senyphine on deviantART

So you, too, are a part of me. My solitude
always beginning, as grass grows, is a tide
running at daybreak out of the grayrose east
to slide over the sand, encircle
the drowned beauty, the dead bird, the old boot;
my life explores the caves, pours into pools,
hunts with the starry hunters. I stretch out
fingers of grass, fingers of flame, and touch
my own name engraved on air, own flesh
walking towards me down a dream. I wheel
as a wave pounces, unmask the stranger:
you too a part of me, I enter the gate of your eyes,
my beggar, my brother, answer of the sea.

(Denise Levertov, Holland, 1947)

I found this as an ancient email from ely'chelai-rah posted to awakenings, a now long-dead list, saved for some reason on a floppy disk along with a number of other messages of the same 1999 vintage. (It was apparently a folder-dump of some type because there were also a couple that belonged to the boyfriend I was living with at the time, which was a pretty weird pastenblasten. Nothing private; just stuff about a LARP event he was involved with called "Adventurers' Inn." Anyway--) I was originally going to repost it where I thought it had come from when I thought it was sidhelist, but as mentioned, when I re-checked it I noticed it was awakenings and that's no longer extant. So since LiveJournal is the new black of the 21st century, or something, here you go:

From "Wanderings: Notes and Sketches" by Hermann Hesse.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world
rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up on their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and most noblest wood had the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Some really beautiful aurora photographs from a recent big display ("A coronal mass ejection hit Earth on Dec. 14th, sparking a severe (Kp=8) geomagnetic storm and auroras seen as far south as Arizona."): http://spaceweather.com/aurora/gallery_01dec06_page4.htm