Spring Forward

Spring Forward, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
— Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair)

Spring has arrived, here in the UK, and the clocks go forward 1 hour this weekend...

In Infinite Eternity

In Infinite Eternity, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Golden Rays

Golden Rays, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"A lonely sail gleams in the morning
A lonely stranger in the sea
What does he seek in country foreign,
What kind of trouble does he flee?

The waves are swelling, wind is whistling
The mast is bending with a creak
It is not happiness he's seeking
And it's not happiness he flees

The stream beneath is bright as azure
Above the sun sends golden rays...
Yet he, the rebel, seeks a tempest
As if the tempest brings him peace."
— M. Lermontov

Somehwere in the Caribbean Sea between Cuba and Haiti...

Island Freedom

Island Freedom, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first."
— Jim Morrison

Listen: The Doors - Universal Mind

Thunderhead

Thunderhead, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning."
— William Faulkner

Somewhere in the Caribbean Sea between Panama and Jamaica...

Horizon Line

Horizon Line, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore. "
— William Faulkner

Storm Glyphs

Storm Glyphs, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"No one expects the rug to be yanked out from underneath them; life-changing events usually don’t announce themselves. While instinct and intuition can help provide some warning signs, they can do little to prepare you for the feeling of rootlessness that follows when fate flips your world upside down. Anger, confusion, sadness, and frustration are shaken up together inside you like a snow globe. It takes years for the emotional dust to settle as you do your best to see through the storm."
— Slash (Slash)

after the storm...

Solar Backlight

Solar Backlight, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve
on the beach, may your eyelids never flutter
into the empty distance. Don't LEAVE me for
a second, my dearest, because in that moment you'll
have gone so far I'll wander mazily
over all the earth, asking, will you
come back? Will you leave me here, dying?"
— Pablo Neruda

Into-the-sun sihouette time...

By Mystic Isle

By Mystic Isle, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love."
— Meister Eckhart

The mystic isle at sunset...

Wide Open Series #3
#1 is here and #2 is here

In Azure Space

In Azure Space, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"You sit at the edge of the world,
I am in a crater that's no more.
Words without letters
Standing in the shadow of the door.

The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard,
Little fish rain from the sky.
Outside the window there are soldiers,
steeling themselves to die.
~
The drowning girl's fingers
Search for the entrance stone, and more.
Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes --
at Kafka on the shore"
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

Nothing but endless blue sky and azure ocean...

Wide Open Series #2

On Golden Beach

On Golden Beach, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?"
— Rumi (The Essential Rumi)

A bracing stroll in the vast expanse...

Wide Open Series #1

Beyond The Dunes

Beyond The Dunes, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic."
— Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1))

Beyond the dunes lies the endless ocean...

Three Dog Dusk

Three Dog Dusk, a photo by TomRaven on Flickr.

Music at night, and the moonlight on the sea,
The beat of waves upon the rocky shore
And wild white spray, flung high in ecstasy;
The faithful eyes of dogs, and treasured books,
The love of Kin and fellowship of friends
And all that makes life dear and beautiful.
From I Thank Thee God That I Have Lived by Elizabeth Craven (1750 - 1828)

Freedom! - Three dogs bounding along the beach at dusk...