Kurt Brindley's Blog, page 111

Country Roads Are Like No Other no.3

countless are the ways

destinations count but one

yonder lies the bend

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Filed under: Photography Tagged: country roads, destinations, journeys, landscapes, metaphors, nature, nature photography, photography, poetry, roads, spirituality, woods, writing, 俳句

Fenc’d no.5

where the road may lead

and what the fence may restrain

for both I allow

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Filed under: Photography Tagged: barns, bondage, farms, fences, fields, freedom, haiku, metaphors, nature, photography, poetry, roads, writing, 俳句

A Reflective We

nay, the setting sun

it is a reflective we

who settles the day

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A Meditation on an Introduction’s Opening Passage as found in “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Here we find Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the opening passage of his introduction to his seminal essay “Nature,” bemoaning the distance he and his generation are from anything Original and True as compared to preceding generations. As he sees it, only through the firsthand experiences and the tales of our forefathers and foremothers have we been able to learn our life’s lessons and traditions. The gleaming highest highs our civilizations are able to reach are only because of the solid foundations built from and with Nature’s sacred mud by the caring and calloused hands of those to whom have gone before us and who now uplift us still.

If the great Emerson, a transcendental man, perhaps the Transcendental Man as he was in possession of a most extraordinary ability to focus and perceive that which the eye of most mortals miss, is shocked by such a revelation, then it seems to this less-than-transcendental and exceedingly mortal man just how far we find our present selves from those God beholding foregoing generations would bring about the death of fright to such a perceptive and feeling man as he.

And it is not just a distance in generational time I am referring to, but also, mostly, a distance in understanding, as perhaps the same could be said of Emerson’s meaning; though as far as he felt his generation was from an understanding of the Original and True, just how much farther away from understanding we of the present are is too hard for me to imagine.

Just what does our generation know of Nature? of God? of the Universe? Just how many more countless sepulchres have we built and how many more countless biographies have we written? Surely we know greatly of nature and of god and of the universe through the words and misdeeds of our spawning and splintering sects and religious disorders, and through the kaleidoscopic lens and the equations of the material, the physical, carried out to the farthest nth of a degree, accessible to only but a few of our most scientific of brains. Yea, ours is but a weak and plastic generation with hardly one of us finding even a germ under the nail let alone a fleck of sacred earthen mud, so far removed from Nature and Her Elements are we.

Like the everlasting trees

Of the most symbolic

Our ancients bare green before us

Full in their lustrous branches

Roots firmed in their foundation

While with the passing breeze

Our limbs naked and thin

We waive

Lo! but look at me. Look at me, me with my naked, thin limbs waiving away my right of birth to ancient spirits more alive long dead than I whose blood still courses hot will every be. I whose blood still courses hot but whose heart has grown cold and without passion for the Original, the True. I lie content each night having yet let another day slip away without once baring my feet and stepping into the grass; without once feeling the raw moonglow on my rusty skin.

But it wasn’t always so. I wasn’t always so distant from the Original and the True. And neither were you, for we were all born of and from the Original and of the True. It is who, in essence, I am and who you are.

We just forgot, that’s all.

We just allowed each passing day to take us farther and farther from who we were born to be.

So much time has

passed since then,

since I last felt raw

moonglow on

my rusty skin,

that I have forgotten

how the breath of night

can upturn a sallow face.

Long ago,

when I could still remember

how to pause,

and how to listen,

and how to breathe,

for more reasons

than just to breathe,

I knew fields

and wood,

and calico aster;

I knew how to kneel,

and how to observe,

and how to bring myself to quiet.

And I knew,

without knowing,

that if I lay

on my back

beneath the reeds

and remained hushed,

as night clouds

floated by,

shadowed and silent,

that my Self

would simply fall

away.

Step Into the Grass, an excerpt

from Poems from the River

As romping youth we did not have to be told how to meditate, how to pray. We just knew. We had no need for such technical terms as spirituality or epiphany or satori, for it was in our unknowing that we were able to truly know them. And now that we know them, we know nothing.

I suppose the question is, then, can we return to our essence? Can we, in our knowledge and understanding, return to the bliss of ignorance, to the wisdom of youth, so that we can come back again, if even just a little closer, to the Original and True.

Are we able to do that, knowing what we know?

Tonight

I’ll bare my feet

and step old and aching

into the caliginous balm

of the cool redemptive night.

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Filed under: Literary Tagged: ancestors, authors, book reviews, essays, nature, non-fiction, philosophy, poetry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, religion, reviews, spirituality, writing, zen

Even when in the midst of a meltdown…

Keep Smilin’

 

Show me one who is sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy. Show him me. By the gods I would fain see a Stoic.

~ from The Discourses of Epictetus

#notetoself

#iamthatiam

#prosochē

#takenothingseriouslyseriously

#snowpersonsarepeopletoo

 

 

Filed under: Notes to Self Tagged: #iamthatiam, abundance, affirmations, Epictetus, notes to self, philosophy, photography, quotes, snow, snowman, stoic philosophers, stoicism, Stoics

I’m not the kinda guy who would normally use a word like “adorable” but…

Adorable

 

 

Filed under: Photography Tagged: animals, cute puppies, dogs, photography, puppies, puppy photography

Everlasting

Like the everlasting trees

Of the most symbolic

Our ancients bare green before us

Full in their lustrous branches

Roots firmed in their foundation

While with the passing breeze

Our limbs naked and thin

We waive

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Edition 003-15 germane

 

 

Filed under: Photography Tagged: accomplishments, ancients, birth rights, evergreen trees, family, fields, generations, grass, nature, nature poetry, photography, poetry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing

Let the Games Begin! The IABS&R Volume 3 Games, that is…

A while back, I made notice that we were going to manage IABS&R Volume 3 a little bit differently than we had the previous two. Seeing how I am knee deep into my Emerson Commitment, and I am slowly, very slowly, putting together a collection of my short stories and flash fiction, I thought it best not to commit to a moderation of submissions and all the this and that it entails and just invite authors to send me print editions of their work directly…

And lo and behold, someone did send me a book directly. How about that…

I am very pleased and privileged to introduce to you the novel HAWSER, a, what looks to be very compelling, work of intrigue and adventure from an author with a name that I happen to think is a very cool and catchy authorial-type-name and one to be reckoned with – J Hardy Carroll.

Now, as I am chock-full of things to do in the present and beyond, it will be some time before I make the determination as to whether to actually read and review the book. In the interim, I will post it on my sidebar for you all to view and consider in a blatant effort of mine to coax and convince you into purchasing it so that you yourself may do the most honorable thing a reader can do for an Indie Author, which of course is to review it!. And during this lag of time between now and when I make my IABS&R Volume 3 determination, as opposed to “selection” since I have but one book to choose from, I invite you to send – as in mail – as in postal service mail (see Contact page for address) – me a polished and ready for prime time print edition version of your book, which may include just about any genre except Erotica and Romance. At which time, once received, I can then properly reclassify this IABS&R volume properly as a “selection” vice “determination.”

You dig?

So, without further ado and nonsense from me, I present to you J Hardy Carroll’s novel, HAWSER.

A little package of a self-contained world of alternate reality delivered straight to my PO Box doorstep courtesy the author and via CreateSpace and the United States Postal Service…

 

Despite this poorly presented picture of mine, this is a very eye-catching cover and one that conveys the intense vibe that one would expect a cover for a story about a world war to convey

 

The back cover is also sharp and blurb-appropriate

 

I really like the name of the publishing imprint – GRAPNEL BOOKS, with its logo picture of a grappling hook…awesomeness

 

Weighing in at 337 pages, all of which promise intrigue and adventure

 

Please visit and follow J Hardy Carroll at

hawesescapes.com

 

 

Filed under: Reviews Tagged: books, books reviews, editing, fiction, independent publishing, Indie Authors, publishing, publishing platforms, reviews, The Greatest Generation, war, World War II, writing

Snow Person

 

#snowpersonsarepeopletoo

#divineabundanceabounds

#iamthatiam

Filed under: Photography Tagged: abundance, divine, divine gratitude, family, nature, nature photography, photography, snow, snow person, snowfall, snowman, spirituality

Eternal Roots

roots born into ground

as eternal as the sky

hallowed thine remains

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Filed under: Photography Tagged: ancestors, eternity, hallowed ground, nature, nature photography, nature poems, photography, poetry, roots, sky, spirituality, trees, writing, 俳句