“Autumn … the year’s last, loveliest smile.”

~ William Cullen Bryant

i was in the middle of writing a piece about a book i am currently reading & loving when i paused to read a biography about carol ruckdeschel and her fight to save the sea turtles & their home on cumberland island. (when it comes to books, i find myself completely unable to read just one.)

when i read these lines, i just had to share them.

“She closed her eyes and let the darkness settle in. Is this what death will look like? she wondered. There wouldn’t even be the color black. She felt utterly empty and blank, like the gaze of the turtle carcass in the meadow. She didn’t want to die and become nothing. She loved being alive so much.

Then she opened her eyes and looked up again at the blackness between the stars. Her tiny speck of life was utterly insignificant in the sweep of space. Its vastness left her feeling dizzy and disoriented. But it also made her feel something else, something surprisingly close to … free. She was completely, utterly free to live her one and only life until she died. Death was as natural and necessary as life, and both were far older and larger than she had imagined. Each breath connected her to the first algae and the last dinosaur. All the animals that had ever lived and died – they were all part of the same precious matter – and so was she. She belonged to it all, from the stars to the soil. She wasn’t nothing. She was everything.”

~ from the book Untamed by Will Harlan

she wasn’t nothing. she was everything.

yes, yes, yes.

(also apropos, since recently, i came to a similar conclusion.)

“In summer, the song sings itself.”

~ William Carlos Williams

“Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”

~ Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes

“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.”

~ Rilke

“Everyone who terrifies you is 65% water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust,
and I know
sometimes
you cannot breathe deeply, and
the night sky is no home, and
that you are down to your last two percent,
but
nothing is infinite,
not even loss.
You are made of the sea and the stars, and
one day,
you are going to find yourself again.”

~ Finn Butler

“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.”

~ Victor Hugo

“I am here to seduce you into a love of life;
to help you become a little more poetic;
to help you die to the mundane and to the ordinary
so that the extraordinary explodes in your life.”

~ Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

“October’s poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter.”

~ Nova S. Bair

(i am currently loving this photo & this quote. since it is mid-winter here in the northern hemisphere, it seemed an opportune time to share.)

“The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson