Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais

Sir John Everett Millais's Ophelia depicts a calm, drowning Ophelia surrounded by lush, blooming nature. Shakespeare's Ophelia, mad with grief, falls while picking flowers. Millais presents her floating in the water, her head, hands, and dress not yet submerged. The dark pool of water at her stomach on which her garland of flowers floats hints that rest of her body will soon sink below the surface. Ophelia's expression shows no panic or despair. Her skin glows with life yet, not death. The looming leaves and brush around her seem to swallow her as much as the water does. The flowers and green brush on the far bank and the brown willow reach out over her, while the green in the foreground closes in on her. Millais has not generalized the flowers on the bank or in her garland. He carefully renders the poppies and violets as symbols of her death and faithfulness.

The attention to detail--in the natural setting, the fading glimmer of her gown, and her elegant repose--characterizes a Pre-Raphaelite style, but here the effect of these details seems more poignant. Millais has captured a specific, fleeting moment just after her fall but before her death, and he has immortalized Ophelia. Every reflection and flick of light give the impression of frozen time, and it suggests that Ophelia, though unchanging on the canvas before the viewer, had not always been so close to death and would not remain afloat much longer. Millais painting presents a crystallized moment between life and death.

 

 

The time traveller ...

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”

 

Virginia Woolf

 

Rainy Parisian Sidewalk Cafe by Lindsarm2

 

The Name of the Wind ...

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.”

Patrick Rothfuss

Franz Kafka is Dead ...

"He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children's hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees , Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.

That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children wake up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone.

They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It's said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.” 

Nicole Krauss

 

 

Blindsight ...

“Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.” 

Anaïs Nin

 

 

Saints Cosmas and Damian and their Brothers Surviving the Stake by Fra Angelico

 

Painted between 1439-1442 this piece was once part of a predella, or lower register of Fra Angelico's most important altarpiece. Other parts of it are scattered in various galleries worldwide. The altarpiece was painted for the church of San Marco in Florence, and was commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici - whose name is echoed in the profession of Sts Cosmas and Damian (‘medici’ means 'physicians' in Italian).

 

Cosmas and Damian were two physician brothers living in Asia Minor in the third century. They and their three younger brothers were Christians, and during Diocletian persecutions they were compelled to prove their loyalty to the traditional gods with a sacrifice. When they refused, Lycias, the Roman Consul, submitted them to a series of brutal tortures. Miraculously they survived the torments but, finally, the enraged Consul has them all beheaded.

 

The episode represented here is the fruitless attempt to burn the five brothers. A circle of flames surrounds them, but the fire turns against the torturers, under the incredulous eyes of Lycias and his dignitaries.

 

“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.” 

Wayne W. Dyer

Children of the Sun by Dead Can Dance

We are ancients
As ancient as the sun
We came from the ocean
Once our ancestral home
So that one day
We could all return
To our birthright
The great celestial dome

We are the children of the sun
Our journey's just begun
Sunflowers in our hair
We are the children of the sun
There is room for everyone
Sunflowers in our hair

Throughout the ages
Of iron, bronze, and stone
We marvelled at the night sky
And what may lie beyond
We burned offerings
To the elemental ones
Made sacrifices
For beauty, peace and love

We are the children of the sun
Our kingdom will come
Sunflowers in our hair
We are the children of the sun
Our carnival's begun
Our songs will fill the air

And you know it's time
To look for reasons why
Just reach up and touch the sky
To the heavens we'll ascend
We are the children of the sun
Our journey has begun

All the older children
Come out at night
Anaemic, soulless
Great hunger in their eyes
Unaware of the beauty
That sleeps tonight

And all the queen's horses
And all the king's men
Will never put these children back
Together again

Faith, hope, our charities
Greed, sloth, our enemies

We are the children of the sun
We are the children of the sun

Hellelil and Hilderbrand,The Meeting on the Turret Stairs by Frederic William Burton

This painting (1864) depicts the ill-fated lovers Hellelil and Hildebrand, meeting on the stone stairway of a medieval tower. The princess and her bodyguard had fallen in love but her father regarded the young soldier as an unsuitable match for his daughter and ordered his sons to kill him. The painting captures the couple’s poignant final embrace.

The painting is a popular fixture in the National Gallery of Ireland.

The Sound and the Fury ...

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” 

William Faulkner

 

Woman Sleeping by Jean Spitzer

 

Wheatfield with Crows by Vincent van Gogh

“They are endless wheatfields under a cloudy sky, and I have not hesitated to attempt to express sadness and the deepest loneliness.”
Vincent van Gogh

This is one of the most famous works of Vincent van Gogh, a dramatic painting commonly associated with the artist’s suicide, which happened a few weeks later. Contrary to what is commonly thought, it is almost sure that this was not Van Gogh's last painting.

The representation of the wheat fields of Auvers-sur-Oise under different atmospheric conditions was one of Van Gogh’s favorite subjects during the last months of his life. In addition to the famous painting "of the crows", the artist painted "Wheatfield under a stormy sky", in a canvas of the same dimensions as this one, as well as several smaller pictures. But "Wheatfield with Crows" is unique for its vigorous strokes, its dark stormy sky -accentuating the contrast with the yellow wheat- and the presence of the crows, which has given rise to numerous interpretations.

Symbolic Interpretations

The paths: It's not a difficult leap to symbolically equate the separate paths in Wheat Field with Crows with the paths, past and future, of Van Gogh's own life. The paths are basically comprised of three sets: two in each foreground corner and a third in the middle winding toward the horizon. The left and right foreground paths defy logic in that they seem to originate from nowhere and lead to nowhere. Some have interpreted this as Van Gogh's own ongoing confusion about the sporadic direction his own life had taken. The third, middle path has remained the most fertile for symbolic interpretation. Does the path lead anywhere? Does it successfully transverse the wheat field and seek new horizons? Or does it, in fact, terminate in an inescapable dead end? Van Gogh leaves it to the viewer to decide.

The sky: From his earliest years as an artist Van Gogh was fond of scenes involving stormy skies . Van Gogh held a great deal of respect for the forces of nature and includes turbulent skies in a number of his works because the subject is so powerful and so full of artistic potential in the face of an empty canvas. Furthermore, Van Gogh once wrote about the liberating possibilities of storms: "The pilot sometimes succeeds in using a storm to make headway, instead of being wrecked by it." . Of course, as the years passed and Van Gogh's own mental state of well being became more battered, his perceptions toward nature may have darkened. Nevertheless, it can be argued that Van Gogh perceived storms as a vital and positive part of nature (admittedly, at least as he suggests in his earlier letters).

The crows: Perhaps the most powerful image within Wheat Field with Crows is that of the crows themselves. Again, much symbolic interpretation has sprung from the depiction of the flock of crows. Much of the speculation hinges on whether the crows are flying toward the painter (and, hence, the viewer) or away from him. If the viewer chooses to perceive the crows flying toward the foreground, then the work becomes more foreboding. If away, then a sense of relief is felt.

Opium by Dead Can Dance

I feel like I want to live
Far from the metropolis
Just walk through that door
Sometimes
I feel like I want to fly
Reach out to the painted sky
A prisoner to the wind
A bird on the wing

Sometimes
I feel the ocean in my blood
See rain from the sky above
Her salt brined tears
And now
Those tears leave taste on my tongue
Like the warm rush you get from
Black opium
Black opium

Sometimes
I feel like I want to leave
Behind all these memories
And walk through that door
Outside
The black night calls my name
But all roads look the same
They lead nowhere
They lead nowhere

The dead sunflowers ...

Dreams of a Dark Warrior ...

“Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”

Janet Fitch

 

 

 

 

 

Things that time cannot mend ...

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep ... that have taken hold. ~Frodo” 

J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Vincent Oyenga

 

 

 

   

Save Me by Gotye

In the mornings
I was anxious
It's better just to stay in bed
Didn't want to fail myself again

Running through all the options
And the endings
Were rolling out in front of me
But I couldn't choose a thread to begin

And I could not love
'Cause I could not love myself
Never good enough, no
That was all I'd tell myself
And I was not well
But I could not help myself
I was giving up on living

In the morning
You were leaving
Travelling south again
And you said you were not unprepared

And all the dead ends
And disappointments
Were fading from your memory
Ready for that lonely life to end

And you gave me love
When I could not love myself
And you made me turn
From the way I saw myself
And you're patient, love
And you help me help myself
And you save me
And you save me
Yeah you save me

Eleven minutes ...

“Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.
Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meetings are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes direction.” 

Paulo Coelho

 

 

For One More Day ...

“But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.” 

Mitch Albom

 

 

The Left Hand of Darkness ...

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Not the same ...

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” 

Heraclitus

 

 

Midnight sun ...

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes.

Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

Haruki Murakami

 

 

The Blue Dancers by Edgar Degas

“We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.”


Albert Einstein

 

 

Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master...”

Elizabeth Gilbert

In our minds ...

“After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart ... and we can only repossess them in our minds.”

James Baldwin

Portrait of Ginevra de Benci by Leonardo Da Vinci

Ginevra de' Benci (1457–c. 1520) was an aristocrat from 15th-century Florence, admired for her intelligence by Florentine contemporaries. She is the subject of a portrait painted by Leonardo da Vinci.

It is known from three written sources that Leonardo painted a portrait of Ginevra de' Benci in 1474, possibly to commemorate her marriage that year to Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini at the age of 16. The painting's imagery and the text on the reverse of the panel support the identification of this picture. Directly behind the young lady in the portrait is a juniper tree. The reverse of the portrait is decorated with a juniper sprig encircled by a wreath of laurel and palm and is memorialized by the phrase VIRTUTEM FORMA DECORAT ("beauty adorns virtue"). The Italian word for juniper is "ginepro", which suggests that the juniper motif was used here as a symbolic pun on Ginevra's name. Fittingly, juniper was also a Renaissance symbol for chastity. 

A strip from the bottom of the painting was removed in the past, presumably due to damage, and Ginevra's arms and hands were lost.

It is believed Ginevra's hands removed from the painting were inspired on Verocchio's Portrait of a Woman sculpture. Leonardo was Verocchio's apprentice when young and had an opportunity to see this work very closely.

Portrait of a Woman by Verocchio

Below is one of Leonardo's sketches of  hands today in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, it exemplifies Leonardo's intense attention to, even fascination with, anatomical correctness and the effects of light and shadow. At the bottom, one hand is folded underneath another, more developed one, as if resting in a lap. That lightly-sketched hand seems to be the ghost of the top hand, which holds a sprig of some sort of plant, the outline of the thumb is nearly identical. These two highly developed hands are worked up with dark crosshatching and white chalk highlights, creating a sense of mass even on a sheet of paper. In each, everything from the muscles of thumb-pads to the wrinkles of skin along the joints of the fingers is depicted with the utmost care. Even when Leonardo lightly sketches the rest of the forearm or the "ghost" hand, his lines are deft and confident, showing how much he strove to depict the human form correctly.

This is a simulation on how the portrait would look like if it had not had its bottom part removed.

“Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

Divine presence ...

“There are no random acts...

We are all connected...

You can no more separate one's life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind...” 

Mitch Albom

Time is coming ...

“Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.”

Téa Obreht

Calumny of Apelles by Sandro Botticelli

The Calumny of Apelles was painted by Sandro Botticelli around 1494–1495. The theme subject was drawn from a painting by the Greek artist Apelle. The dramatic court scene is of an innocent man who is dragged before the king. Various human figures representing emotions are scattered around the canvas.

Though Apelles' works have not survived, Lucian recorded details of one in his On Calumny:

 “On the right of it sits a man with very large ears, almost like those of Midas, extending his hand to Slander while she is still at some distance from him. Near him, on one side, stand two women—Ignorance, I think, and Suspicion. On the other side, Slander is coming up, a woman beautiful beyond measure, but full of passion and excitement, evincing as she does fury and wrath by carrying in her left hand a blazing torch and with the other dragging by the hair a young man who stretches out his hands to heaven and calls the gods to witness his innocence. She is conducted by a pale ugly man who has piercing eye and looks as if he had wasted away in long illness; he may be supposed to be Envy. Besides, there are two women in attendance on Slander, egging her on, tiring [dressing] her and tricking her out. According to the interpretation of them given me by the guide of the picture, one was Treachery and the other Deceit. They were followed by a woman dressed in deep mourning, with black clothes all in tatters—Repentance, I think her name was. At all events, she was turning back with tears in her eyes and casting a stealthy glance, full of shame, at Truth, who was approaching.”



Golden days ...

“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.” 

Virginia Woolf

Vanity by Frank Cadogan Cowper - 1907

Borderliners ...

“Once you have realised that there is no objective external world to be found; that what you know is only a filtered and processed version, then it is a short step to the thought that, in that case, other people too are nothing but a processed shadow, and but a short step more to the belief that every person must somehow be shut away, isolated behind their own unreliable sensory apparatus. And then the thought springs easily to mind that man is, fundamentally, alone. That the world is made up of disconnected consciousnesses, each isolated within the illusion created by its own senses, floating in a featureless vacuum.
He does not put it so bluntly, but the idea is not far away. That, fundamentally, man is alone.” 

Peter Høeg 

The winter girl ...

“You know how to call me, although such a noise now would only confuse the air ...

Neither of us can forget the steps we danced, the words you stretched to call me out of dust ...

Yes I long for you, not just as a leaf for weather or vase for hands ... but with a narrow human longing that makes a man refuse any fields but his own ...

I wait for you at an unexpected place in your journey like the rusted key or the feather you do not pick up. I will never find the faces for all goodbyes I've made ...


Leonard Cohen

The you that you left sleeping ...

“I looked around me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Infinities ...

“The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.” 

Charles Simic

In prison ...

“Anger is just anger. It isn't good. It isn't bad. It just is. What you do with it is what matters. It's like anything else. You can use it to build or to destroy. You just have to make the choice."

Constructive anger," the demon said, her voice dripping sarcasm.

Also known as passion," I said quietly. "Passion has overthrown tyrants and freed prisoners and slaves. Passion has brought justice where there was savagery. Passion has created freedom where there was nothing but fear. Passion has helped souls rise from the ashes of their horrible lives and build something better, stronger, more beautiful.”  

Jim Butcher

Salome in prison by Gustave Moreau 1873

Woman's Head by Leonardo da Vinci - 1473

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.” 

Chuck Palahniuk

Anastasis by Dead Can Dance

"A field of sunflowers, ripened, and then blackened, by the sun, standing with sad, slightly crowned heads. Less dead than dormant, the heads and stems will one day be chopped, but then via the roots, will return. For Anastasis is the Greek word for ‘resurrection’ and the seemingly dead, will dance again. "

Jupiter and Callisto by Peter Paul Rubens - 1613

The Jupiter and Callisto is one of the many secular subjects Rubens painted in this relief style. The subject of the painting is taken from Ovid. Diana's nymphs were expected to be as chaste as the goddess herself. One of them, Callisto, was seduced by Jupiter who first disguised himself as Diana in order to gain the nymphs presence. Her pregnancy was eventually noticed by Diana who punished Callisto by changing her into a a bear and setting the dogs on her. But Jupiter snatched her up to heaven just in time.

Beauty is a light in the heart ...

“Please allow me to wipe the slate clean. Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. 

 Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Three stages of women by Edvard Munch 1

Love Disarmed by Bouguereau -1885

“I have no use for divine patience -
My lips are now burning and everywhere.
I am running from every corner of this earth and sky
Wanting to kiss you.”
Hafez

Eyes are blind ...

“People where you live, the little prince said, grow five thousand roses in one garden ...
yet they don't find what they're looking for ...

They don't find it,  I answered.

And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water ...

Of course, I answered.

And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”


Antoine de Saint-Exupéry -The Little Prince

Ordinary madness ...

“There is a relationship between the eye contacts we make and the perceptions that we create in our heads, a relationship between the sound of another's voice and the emotions that we feel in our hearts, a relationship between our movements in space all around us and the magnetic pulls we can create between others and ourselves. All of these things (and more) make up the magic of every ordinary day and if we are able to live in this magic, to feel and to dwell in it, we will find ourselves living with magic every day. These are the white spaces in life, the spaces in between the written lines, the cracks in which the sunlight filters into. Some of us swim in the overflowing of the wine glass of life, we stand and blink our eyes in the sunlight reaching unseen places, we know where to find the white spaces, we live in magic.”


C. JoyBell C.

Kiss From a Rose by Seal

"Kiss From A Rose"

There used to be a graying tower alone on the sea.
You became the light on the dark side of me.
Love remained a drug that's the high and not the pill.
But did you know,
That when it snows,
My eyes become large and
The light that you shine can be seen.
Baby,
I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the gray.
Ooh,
The more I get of you,
The stranger it feels, yeah.
And now that your rose is in bloom.
A light hits the gloom on the gray.
There is so much a man can tell you,
So much he can say.
You remain,
My power, my pleasure, my pain, baby
To me you're like a growing addiction that I can't deny.
Won't you tell me is that healthy, baby?
But did you know,
That when it snows,
My eyes become large and the light that you shine can be seen.
Baby,
I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the gray.
Ooh, the more I get of you
The stranger it feels, yeah
Now that your rose is in bloom.
A light hits the gloom on the gray,
I've been kissed by a rose on the gray,
I've been kissed by a rose
I've been kissed by a rose on the gray,
...And if I should fall along the way
I've been kissed by a rose
...been kissed by a rose on the gray.
There is so much a man can tell you,
So much he can say.
You remain
My power, my pleasure, my pain.
To me you're like a growing addiction that I can't deny, yeah
Won't you tell me is that healthy, baby.
But did you know,
That when it snows,
My eyes become large and the light that you shine can be seen.
Baby,
I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the gray.
Ooh, the more I get of you
The stranger it feels, yeah
Now that your rose is in bloom,
A light hits the gloom on the gray.
Yes I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the gray
Ooh, the more I get of you
The stranger it feels, yeah
And now that your rose is in bloom
A light hits the gloom on the gray
Now that your rose is in bloom,
A light hits the gloom on the gray.

Million Little Pieces ...

“When I see you, the world stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The world just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you.” 

James Frey

My mind is your mind ...

“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.”  

Charles de Lint

Spring by Pierre Auguste Cot

Words that get lost ...

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past:

I was a beautiful girl ... Please don’t go ... I too believe my body is made of glass - I’ve never loved anyone ... I think of myself as funny ... Forgive me….

There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.

The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.

When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.” 

Nicole Krauss

 Amour a laffut by William Bouguereau

Change of Heart ...

“In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.” 

Jodi Picoult

Time for peace ...

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.”


Anonymous

Shifting ...

“I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens.

 I've been knocking from the inside.” 

Rumi

The Siren Of Wood by Therion

Night & Sleep ...

“An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: For loving a true love.
Feet: To chase after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky.
The mind, for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved:
The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.
But when he finds his love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed.” 

Rumi

Taking another step ...

“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.” 

  Paulo Coelho

Parenthesis in eternity ...

“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust , swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment.

 It is a little parenthesis in eternity.”

Paulo Coelho

The kiss by Francesco Hayez