This morning...

...I heard a noise in the leaves, and it turned out to be this cicada in its death throes, buzzing its last buzz. I feel horror when I see a dying creature—any creature, even a small, strange, absurd one. The sight of death accomplished can have a somber beauty, but dying, the transition from one existence to another, seems awful. There are moments when I find a sense of peace with it, even a love of the mystery, but most of the time I encounter it as a cruelty. That is a failure on my part, I think—a failure of both reason and imagination. I hope to walk beyond it someday.


*Photo by Maria Browning. Click on the image to enlarge it.

"Water is taught by thirst"

Water is taught by thirst;
Land, by the oceans passed;
Transport, by throe;
Peace, by its battles told;
Love, by memorial mould;
Birds, by the snow.

~ Emily Dickinson

Photo by Maria Browning. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Reprise*

“Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”

~ Erwin Schrödinger, from My View of the World

*I used this passage in another post, years ago. I can't think of one more suited to repeating.


Photo by Maria Browning. Click on the image to enlarge it.