Joseph Campbell
“Where there is way or a path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. Find your path. Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure.”
Teo Ruiz (UCLA Department of History)
“The things that are beautiful, that move us
and change us are also essentially painful.
The capturing of that moment in time in
which you can see into the heart . . . that is painful. Whatever is beautiful, we can grasp
for the moment---like the sunset. It is that instant we comprehend and then it
withdraws and we are left bereft.”
Cedric Wright
“The great river passes, forever flowing down thru time,
flowing through many
channels, fading out of the
embraces of its many names,
simple as the voice of a child,
and never completely
known.”
Sally Mann
“Working in the inexhaustible natural pageant before me, I came to wonder if the artist who commands the landscape might in fact hold the key to the secrets of the human heart: place, personal history, and metaphor. Since my place and its story were givens, it remained for me to find those metaphors; encoded, half-forgotten clues within the southern landscape.”
Georgia O’Keeffe
“Take time to look.”
Silent Horizon Elyse (Brownell) Shugrue (2013)
(created in response to this photograph)
I talk to you in shadows
like waves, stretching hands from side to side,
reaching for the echo of night’s calling
A separation of earth to---
A lingering: your presence
The only sound---
come to me, a ghostly image
sketching skylines
Listen for the break---
I am there, holding mountains in my palms,
a tremor from the end of---
the beginning to---
Lover, do not stand below the gray;
submerge, leaving blurred lines
of tomorrow’s tracings
break open body, snap bone, unveil:
come closer to this silent horizon,
stay inside the vastness,
collect vacancy like pebbles,
I will meet you there.
Threshold Wendell Berry
I know for a while again
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valley side,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset passing across.
And I know
that this is one of those thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which even I may step
forth from my self and be free.
Mary Oliver
To pay attention, this is our endless task.