Fragment: a part broken off, something cut or detached from the whole, something imperfect… something perfectly imperfect, unnoticed, yet beautiful in its own right.
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
Henry David Thoreau
“The pebble in the brook secretly believes itself to be a precious stone.”
Japanese proverb
“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder.”
Ansel Adams
“She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”
Vincent Van Gogh
Up here. A face
Loses its lines
I look to see
The colour of your eyes …
They have turned
To water.
I lean forward
To catch
The scent of your hair –
All I smell is heather.
I touch your hand
And all I feel is earth and stones.
There is nothing left
But the hillside’s breast
Your flesh and bones
Have vanished.
Jay Woodman
“If it weren’t for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no song.”
Carl Perkins
Love holds me captive again
and I tremble with bittersweet longing
As a gale on the mountainside bends the oak tree
I am rocked by my love
Sappho
“Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilisations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break….I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.”
Edward Abbey
And when thou art weary, I’ll find thee a bed,
Of mosses, and flowers, to pillow thy head;
There, beauteous Emma, I’ll sit at thy feet,
While my story of love I enraptur’d repeat.
John Keats
“I do not know how I may seem to others, but to myself I am only a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to be contented with.”
Plato
Very little grows on jagged rock.
Be ground. Be crumbled.
So wild flowers will come up
Where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different. Surrender.
Rumi
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
Vladimir Nabokov
“We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things.”
John Wesley Powell
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
William Henry Davies
