Fragments of Nature

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