Monthly Archives: August 2019

They like a little shade.

home, my garden, , , ,

In this season when they are happiest, I took pictures of most of my succulents. Many of them are blooming, and it’s hard to get a good picture of that, because their flowers are often on a stem that stretches far from the mother plant before the blooms open.

They are pleasant images from my life, where this week the plumbers and other workers are busy doing repair work before any of my new construction can start. Just one day of it was unnerving for various reasons that are not pleasant, so I won’t bother going into all that. And eventually all will be well… it was good to sleep, and wake to hear the fountain singing.

I don’t know the names of most, but a couple that I do know here are Red Sedum  and Hens and Chicks…  The purple flowers are not a succulent, but bacopa or Sutera cordata.

The busyness around here makes me feel an affinity with these plants, which like the heat of summer, as I also do. They can live without water for long periods, but most of them require a little quiet shade in order to thrive. It occurs to me that I might brush some pine needles off the bench and sit a spell with my garden friends this very afternoon.

A sense of enduring harmony did not abandon him.

art, quotes, ,

Today we remember the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). Below are a couple of paragraphs from his comments on the idea that “beauty will save the world,” from the website of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute:

“One artist imagines himself the creator of an autonomous spiritual world; he hoists upon his shoulders the act of creating this world and of populating it, together with the total responsibility for it. But he collapses under the load, for no mortal genius can bear up under it, just as, in general, the man who declares himself the center of existence is unable to create a balanced spiritual system. And if a failure befalls such a man, the blame is promptly laid to the chronic disharmony of the world, to the complexity of modern man’s divided soul, or to the public’s lack of understanding.

“Another artist recognizes above himself a higher power and joyfully works as a humble apprentice under God’s heaven, though graver and more demanding still is his responsibility for all he writes or paints—and for the souls which apprehend it. However, it was not he who created this world, nor does he control it; there can be no doubts about its foundations. It is merely given to the artist to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and ugliness of man’s role in it—and to vividly communicate this to mankind. Even amid failure and at the lower depths of existence— in poverty, in prison, and in illness—a sense of enduring harmony cannot abandon him.”

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A Match with the Moon

poetry, ,

A MATCH WITH THE MOON

Weary already, weary miles to-night
I walked for bed: and so, to get some ease,
I dogged the flying moon with similes.
And like a wisp she doubled on my sight
In ponds; and caught in tree-tops like a kite;
And in a globe of film all liquorish
Swam full-faced like a silly silver fish;—
Last like a bubble shot the welkin’s height
Where my road turned, and got behind me, and sent
My wizened shadow craning round at me,
And jeered, “So, step the measure,—one two three!”
And if I faced on her, looked innocent.
But just at parting, halfway down a dell,
She kissed me for good-night. So you’ll not tell.

-Dante Gabriel Rossetti

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Welkin means “the sky; the vault of heaven.”