True Blues

“Blue color is everlastingly appointed by the Deity to be a source of delight.”

–John Ruskin

At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue.

– Carl Sagan

A majority of introverted personalities favor the color [blue], the color of circumspection, for it is allied with conscious control of emotions. … blue is the color of deliberation and introspection, of conservatism and acceptance of obligations. Those who favor it have reflective minds and honest intentions, but sometimes use reason for selfish and self-justified purposes.

– Faber Birren

Image credit : 1 , 2 , 3 

Sunrise in Your Heart

Behold the rising sun

Its red and orange streaks

Gradually spreading over the sky

Like a gigantic catherine’s wheel

Slowly emitting multi-colored lights.

Let your eyes capture the sun

In all its morning grandeur.

Shut them quickly.

Take in the fresh morning air

Let that smile beautify your face even more

Now perceive the sun’s brightness

Radiating from your heart and spread

To all your limbs.

Feel one with Nature

Experience this cosmic grandeur

Can you feel peace imploding within you?

 

Thanks for the beautiful image

 

 

I stood upon the hills, when heaven’s wide arch
Was glorious with the sun’s returning march,
And woods were brightened, and soft gales
Went forth to kiss the sun-clad vales.
The clouds were far beneath me; bathed in light,
They gathered mid-way round the wooded height,
And, in their fading glory, shone
Like hosts in battle overthrown.
As many a pinnacle, with shifting glance.
Through the gray mist thrust up its shattered lance,
And rocking on the cliff was left
The dark pine blasted, bare, and cleft.
The veil of cloud was lifted, and below
Glowed the rich valley, and the river’s flow
Was darkened by the forest’s shade,
Or glistened in the white cascade;
Where upward, in the mellow blush of day,
The noisy bittern wheeled his spiral way.

I heard the distant waters dash,
I saw the current whirl and flash,
And richly, by the blue lake’s silver beach,
The woods were bending with a silent reach.
Then o’er the vale, with gentle swell,
The music of the village bell
Came sweetly to the echo-giving hills;
And the wild horn, whose voice the woodland fills,
Was ringing to the merry shout,
That faint and far the glen sent out,
Where, answering to the sudden shot, thin smoke,
Through thick-leaved branches, from the dingle broke.

If thou art worn and hard beset
With sorrows, that thou wouldst forget,
If thou wouldst read a lesson, that will keep
Thy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep,
Go to the woods and hills! No tears
Dim the sweet look that Nature wears.

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sunrise on the Hills

Wild Mankind, Wilder Nature

The air is free

so lets kill it;

The water is free

so lets waste it;

The sunlight is free

so lets make it dangerous;

The soil is free

so lets make it poisonous;

The sky is free

so lets blacken it;

For we are the most intelligent species

on this helpless earth

Therefore, we can, we can, we can!

 

Is Nature complaining against us?

Is she crying for her losses?

I hear them not.

Nature is smarter than us

We are just a higher part of her

She has given us a free reign

Not to destroy her

But to allow us to usher in

The next evolutionary shift.

This will make her stronger,

More intelligent and powerful

Is Nature complaining?

Can you hear her?

We can’t, we can’t, we can’t!

 

 

 

Thanks for the picture

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

– Edmund & Jules de Goncourt

quotations on Civilization

in Nature’s Company

I had a lovely companion during my vacation in the queenly Himalayan hill station. Her beauty struck a deep response in my heart for, it was highlighted by a mystery, a certain something which seemed to reside veiled within her.

She was there for me whenever I needed her. I just had to open the window of my room and look out and there she was, mirroring the sun-lit sky or glistening under the moon.

………………. She is fondly called the Lake of the Goddess.

 

 

“If the surface of a lake is lashed into waves, the water becomes muddy and the bottom cannot be seen. The lake represents the mind and the bottom of the lake the Atman.”

Patanjali Yoga Sutra

Patanjali

Translated by Swami Prabhavananda & Christopher Isherwood

 

Soothe Your Soul

 

It was dark as night at 9 a.m. in that tiny tropical village atop the plateau. I opened the door to see the gathering of clouds hanging low in the sky, as if each mushroom of dark vapour was vying with the other to reach out to the earth first.

It seemed the rain-heavy nebulous guests had come to greet the earthlings with a message of Beauty and Love. My soul was soothed as I looked up in joy to see the first drops crossing the expanse to kiss the earth.

 

Image : Thanks for the great pic!

 

 

 

 

Slate-coloured clouds with ragged fringes are drifting slowly overhead. Between them one has a glimpse of higher clouds of a lighter gray. I can hear the gentle swish of the rain striking a clearer note on the gravel path and a duller among the leaves. Sometimes it falls straight and heavy, till the air is full of the delicate gray shading, and for half a foot above the ground there is a haze from the rebound of a million tiny globules.

– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Stark Munro Letters