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It’s Sunday Morning in Early November

by Philip Schultz

and there are a lot of leaves already. I could rake and get a head start. The boy’s summer toys need to be put in the basement. I could clean it out or fix the broken storm window. When Eli gets home from Sunday school, I could take him fishing. I don’t fish but I could learn to. I could show him how much fun it is. We don’t do as much as we used to do. And my wife, there’s so much I haven’t told her lately, about how quickly my soul is aging, how it feels like a basement I keep filling with everything I’m tired of surviving. I could take a walk with my wife and try to explain the ghosts I can’t stop speaking to. Or I could read all those books piling up about the beginning of the end of understanding… Meanwhile, it’s such a beautiful morning, the changing colors, the hypnotic light. I could sit by the window watching the leaves, which seem to know exactly how to fall from one moment to the next. Or I could lose everything and have to begin over again.

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Arifien Neif  (Indonesian, b. 1955), I’m Not a Queen, I’m a Woman, 2012. Oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm

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Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931, Finnish) ~ Valkoisia Ruusuja, Konginkangas (White Roses), 1906

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Akseli Gallen-Kallela (Finnish, 1865-1931), View from the Tower of Tarvaspää. Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 65.5 cm.

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Love Thrush    -   Veronica Tomi , 2019.

Finnish, b. 1993 -

Tempera ,  35.5 x 40 cm.

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The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity (Trinity University Press, October 11, 2016) (via Alive on All Channels)

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#finland #colors of summer #flower meadow #All flowers in time bend towards the sun

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Robin Tanner.  Wren and Primroses, 1935.  

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Walking to Oak-Head Pond and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

by Mary Oliver

What is so utterly invisible as tomorrow? Not love, not the wind, not the inside of a stone. Not anything. And yet, how often I’m fooled– I’m wading along in the sunlight– and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining days ahead– I can see the light spilling like a shower of meteors into next week’s trees, and I plan to be there soon– and, so far, I am just that lucky, my legs splashing over the edge of darkness, my heart on fire. I don’t know where such certainty comes from– the brave flesh or the theater of the mind– but if I had to guess I would say that only what the soul is supposed to be could send us forth with such cheer as even the leaf must wear as it unfurls its fragrant body, and shines against the hard possibility of stoppage– which, day after day, before such brisk, corpuscular belief, shudders, and gives way.

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there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so gorgeous as to kick the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon, stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks at the market. Think of that. The long night, the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel and at the end of my block is a basketball court. I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.

Ross Gay, excerpt of “Sorrow Is Not My Name”, in Bringing the Shovel Down (via antigonick)

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Botanical illustrations taken from ‘Collection de Jolies Petites Fleurs’. After P. J. Redouté.

Published 1835.

Images and text information courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  

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Still Life of Potted Plant with Red Flowers     -    Valentino Ghiglia , ca. 1940s.

Italian 1903-1960

oil on bord ,  36 x 36 cm. 

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I am watching a bat scoop the emptiness from the night, watching the hackberry embrace the moon. Sometimes we have to hold hands with our own nightmares. When I tell you that the voice of the nightingale turns dark you have to understand what this love is trying to overcome, you have to know that if you ever leave, if you ever disappear, the sky would rip, and the stars would lose their way.

Richard Jackson, from “Night Sky,” in Resonance: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

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Kazuo NAKAMURA（Canadian, 1926-2002）

Blue Reflections  1962  oil on canvas  101.7 x 127 cm   via

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🎨 Dave Parsons / watercolor sky

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In the summer on the Volga at Ples  -   Alexey Belykh , 1980.

Russian , b. 1923  -

Oil on canvas

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Wassily Kandinsky