Trail of Leaves

Wandering, on the Trail of Leaves

[world-beauty]

NGC 3132: The Southern Ring Nebula

Credits: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA, Donald Waid

[trailofleaves]

Haiku # 856

Clouds over the hills a still image in the flow of time

When I was a child, of around ten, playing in my mountain village, I had a thought that stayed with me until now. Time is an illusion that doesn’t exist; no yesterday, no tomorrow, just the crest of this moment. It was the uncanniest feeling, living only in the present, in the now, which is the only reality. We grow old an die, but always in the now, this moment, which encompasses eternity. Creation is not a moment in the past, removed from us, it is always happening, it is happening eternally, now. There is only this moment, eternally still, forever becoming, turning and turning in the heart of God.

[elixir]

Sunset, blue clowds Félix Vallotton — 1918 Oil on canvas

[trailofleaves]

“Tous les bébés naissent en temps de guerre et dans des villes en ruine. Sitôt qu'on naît, on reçoit les éboulis de la vie. À peine nés, on se trouve sous les pylônes électriques des bruits, des conventions, du peu d'amour. La seule chance qu'on aurait, ce serait d'être élevés par des dieux. C'est effarant de voir qu'on tombe à la naissance entre des mains qui sont inexpérimentées, tremblantes, si peu sûres.”

— Christian Bobin, La lumière du monde

[hissiznota]

[trailofleaves]

“If patriotism acts invisibly as a dissolvent of morality, whether Christian or lay, in time of peace, the contrary takes place in wartime; and this is perfectly natural. Where there is a moral duality, it is always the morality the actual circumstances require that suffers injury. The line of least resistance naturally gives the advantage to the type of morality which, in point of fact, there is no need to exercise: a war morality in peacetime, a peace morality in wartime.

In peacetime, justice and truth, because of the water-tight compartment separating them individually from patriotism, are degraded to the rank of purely private virtues, such as for example politeness; but when the country demands the supreme sacrifice, this very separation deprives patriotism of that total validity which alone can call forth a total effort.”

— Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

[trailofleaves]

Saint Estephan Church, Batroun, Lebanon, July 19, 2026

[wayti-blog]

“Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than itself.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

[fravery]

Vincent Van Gogh Wheat Field with a Lark, 1887 oil on canvas Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

[trailofleaves]

W. S. Merwin Beggars And Kings

In the evening all the hours that weren't used are emptied out and the beggars are waiting to gather them up to open them to find the sun in each one and teach it its beggar's name and sing to it It is well through the night

but each of us has his own kingdom of pains and has not yet found them all and is sailing in search of them day and night infallible undisputed unresting filled with a dumb use and its time like a finger in a world without hands

[the-dew-of-heaven]

[trailofleaves]

laden with heat— from her ripe figs, summer drinks milk and wine

[trailofleaves]

"We talk of love many years before we know anything about it, and we think we know it because we talk of it, or because we repeat what books tell us about it. So that there are ignorances of different degrees, and degrees of knowledge which are quite deceptive." — Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Amiel's journal

[perriaeyjeve]

[trailofleaves]

Haiku # 855

laden with heat— from her ripe figs, summer drinks milk and wine

from her black hair a star glimpsed through old mist

[molly-bl00m]

Santiago Traverso

[exhaled-spirals]

« I crave that feeling you get just before you go to sleep, when everything gives in. The fight ends. The fight of our thinking lives. […] Rest awaits. The relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse. There’s nothing for you to do, or work out. »

— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease

[lunasabatica]

Władysław Podkowiński: Szał uniesień (Ecstasy), 1894.