Here

The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude. ~Voltaire

Swans a swimmingThe water is your friend. You don't have to fight with water, just share the same spirit as the water, and it will help you move. ~Aleksandr Popov

The Zen of walking

Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas. ~J.K. Rowling

Holiday in motion

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
and German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody's imagined Christ child
~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Oneness

We are the same as plants, as trees, as other people, as the rain that falls. We consist of that which is around us, we are the same as everything.
~
Gautama Buddha

Yummy

Fred Winston's Chili

Spices:
2 Tbl ground Ancho Chili’s or chili powder
1 Tbl paprika
1 tsp Greek oregano
1 tsp ground cumin
1/8 tsp hot pepper (optional)

Other:
1 large onion chopped
1 green pepper chopped
3 cloves garlic smashed and minced
1 stalk celery chopped (optional)
1or2 Jalapeno peppers chopped (optional/will make dish very hot)
1 Tbl Worcester sauce
1 dash hot sauce
2 cans beer (Winter lager or Oktoberfest)
1 large can (28oz) chopped tomatoes (drained)
4oz beef stock
1/4 cup peanut oil
2 cans beans (red or black) Kunner's brand - SW style, or your choice.
2 lbs ground chuck, round, turkey, or meat of your choice. (Seasoned over night with Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Poultry Magic)

Instructions:
Blend spice mixture and set aside. Preheat Dutch oven and add oil.
Add chopped vegetables and saute over high heat adding garlic last so that it will not burn, about ten minutes.
Sprinkle spice mixture on top of vegetables and stir in until it appears to be pasty. Deglaze with about half a can/bottle of beer so that the mixture won’t stick. Add more beer if necessary.
Add tomatoes. Then add the Worcester sauce, hot sauce, and beef stock.
Stir, bring to a boil, reduce heat and cover.
In another pan, brown the seasoned meat in small batches. Drain and add to chili mixture in the Dutch oven.
When all the meat is added, stir, add the beans, the remaining beer (reserving the other can for later if needed), stir again, cover and reduce heat to a simmer. Cook covered for one hour stirring occasionally. Open the cover a bit, stir, and add more beer if it needs more liquid, and simmer for another hour or hour and a half. You may serve it at that time, but it is recommended that you let it cool and refrigerate overnight.

Maddness

It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion. ~ Horace

Madness is confusion of levels of fact... Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels. ~ William S. Burroughs

Splash

Flash

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief - William Burroughs

Who are you?

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
Jack London

Spring has its hundred flowers, Autumn its moon, Summer has its cooling breezes, Winter its snow. If you allow no idle concerns To weight on your heart, Your whole life will be one Perennial good season.

Fall falls

"silence
seeks the center
of every tree and rock,
that thing we hold closest-
the end of songs"
- Michael McClintock, Letters in Time

Still life

Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. ~Samuel Butler

Divine vines

Wine is sunlight, held together by water. ~Galileo

Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children - honored as the jewelry of God.... ~Thomas De Quincey

Sun bathing

From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The key of life

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. ~Robert Fripp

A harvest toast

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Nice Tomato's

As she has planted, so does she harvest; such is the field of karma. ~Sri Guru Granth Sahib

Sotto Voce

A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring. ~The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams

Listen

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning. ~Lydia M. Child

MagneticI believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. ~Henry David Thoreau

A reason to live

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. ~Alice Walker

Crazed flowers

Bring me then the plant that points to those bright Lucidites swirling up from the earth,

And life itself exhaling that central breath!

Bring me the sunflower crazed with the love of light. ~Eugenio Montale

Minimalism

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication ~ Leonardo DaVinci

Sense

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us. ~Bill Watterson

As The Poems Go

as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.
~ Charles Bukowski 1992

Perpetual

The poetry of the earth is never dead. ~John Keats

Toil

Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.
~Florence Scovel Shinn

Stunning beauty

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts;

which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things;

which is the mean of many extremes. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Howl

Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
~ Oscar Wilde

Destiny

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance. ~Albert Einstein

Looking back

Pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
~William Wordsworth 1806

Frozen in time

Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume.
~Jean de Boufflers

What is Life

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset." - Crowfoot. . .1890

PerfectionA flower's appeal is in its contradictions - so delicate in form yet strong in fragrance, so small in size yet big in beauty, so short in life yet long on effect. ~Adabella Radici

Here the quiet

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world. ~Hans Margolis

Another lie

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. ~Pablo Picasso

Joyous cosmology
Of course, to say that life is just a gesture, an action without agent, recipient, or purpose, sounds much more empty and futile than joyous.
In the contrast world of ordinary consciousness man feels himself, as will, to be something in nature but not of it.
Sometimes the image of the physical world is not so much a dance of gestures as a woven texture. Light, sound, touch, taste, and smell become a continuous warp, with the feeling that the whole dimension of sensation is a single continuum or field. - Alan Watts

American beauty

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life. ~Jean Giraudoux