From “O Lacrimosa” in Ahead of All Parting by Rainer Maria Rilke:
Ah, but the winters! The earth’s mysterious
turning-within. Where around the dead
in the pure receding of sap,
boldness is gathered,
the boldness of future springtimes.
Where imagination occurs
beneath what is rigid; where all the green
worn thin by the vast summers
again turns into a new
insight and the mirror of intuition;
where the flowers’ color
wholly forgets that lingering of our eyes.
From “Nature” in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique….
“A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all — that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms — the totality of nature….
“Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce…. Thus in art does Nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.”
Hello!
Autumn color came to my neighborhood pretty late this year, butting up against the Christmas holidays and my Christmas photo project (see Days to Christmas 2022). I had taken quite a few leaf and tree photos in late November and early December, and associated the more brightly colored ones with Christmas on three posts…
Autumn Dreams of Christmas (1 of 2)
Autumn Dreams of Christmas (2 of 2)
Seven Days to Christmas: When Nature Does the Decorating
… then yesterday went through what was left from those fall color shoots. For this post and the next one, I put together some small galleries of those photos that remained in my catalog — mostly reds and oranges or yellows, all certainly now blown away with the passing through of last week’s winter storm.
Thanks for taking a look!
