[Image: “That’s not me in the mirror,” by Anais Gómez-C (whose Flickr username seems to be sweet_vengeance; found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) I don’t usually select watermarked images for these posts: certainly it’s up to the photographer or artist to embed a signature or not, yet I find it distracts from the work in order to highlight the work’s creator. (Again, it also may indicate just a touch too much insecurity about their work being “stolen.”) But this image was too apropos to disregard, and the watermark, too discreet to worry about.]
From whiskey river:
Between two and three o’clock—at the half-way house of night—I heard slow hoofs below my window, and leaning out, saw under moonshine two great cart-horses wandering down the road together. They were enjoying a phase of their existence unknown to us. They conversed in little sounds and when one stopped, to snort and sniff at the water of a duck-pond by the way, the other also stopped, raised his head and looked steadfastly up into the starry sky. I saw the moonlight in his big eyes. Presently they put their noses together. Then one gave a slight start—perhaps at the opinions of the other—and side by side they sauntered away into the night-hidden land.
One knew that they were revealing much about themselves concealed from their masters, and meditating upon life in their fashion while man slept.
(Eden Phillpotts [source])
Not from whiskey river:
There is such a dreamlike quality to snow as it falls heavily and piles up, transforming our regular world into an uncanny landscape. Sitting here, watching it, one feels the urge to remember what is underneath, just as when waking from a dream.
Sometimes it isn’t easy to see into what is there in front of us. We know that our dreams are just ways we have of telling ourselves about ourselves when we are asleep, and yet we have learned to keep from ourselves so much of who we fully, truly are that our dreams seem strange. Amazing, isn’t it? What we tell ourselves about ourselves must be told with so much secrecy and arcane symbolism that we can’t remember it, and if we can, we can’t understand it. At such moments our inner world seems shrouded, muted, alienated, as the natural world seems when it is covered with snow.
Isn’t it sad to realize that we have learned not to accept who we fully are? And isn’t it wonderful to remember that gradually, with courage, we can come to accept and include even what at first had appeared so strange, so horrible, so not-me in our dreams?
Can we be resolute about facing, with bare attention, the reality of things? Even when we discover that the old, narrow myth of who we are no longer holds, and the emerging, fuller person is so unexpected?
(Sylvia Forges Ryan [source])
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