[Video: high-speed footage (1000fps) of an “eagle owl” in flight. This film has apparently been around for a while, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before this week. Chief virtue, for me: shows me something I couldn’t have imagined on my own!]
From whiskey river:
I cannot help you understand. In the realm of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. Remember that. Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.
(Tom Robbins [source])
…and:
The Poems of Our Climate
I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
pink and white carnations. The light
in the room more like a snowy air,
reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
at the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations — one desires
so much more than that. The day itself
is simplified: a bowl of white,
cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
with nothing more than the carnations there.II
Say even that this complete simplicity
stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
the evilly compounded, vital I
and made it fresh in a world of white,
a world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
still one would want more, one would need more,
more than a world of white and snowy scents.III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
so that one would want to escape, come back
to what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
since the imperfect is so hot in us,
lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
(Wallace Stevens [source])
