Category: thistle

Sublime Beauty

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thistledowndrizzle

It is looking at things for a long time that ripens and gives you a deeper understanding… Everything that is really good and beautiful, of inward moral, spiritual and sublime beauty, in human beings and in their works, comes from God.
~Vincent Van Gogh

Enclosed field with rising sun --Van Gogh
Enclosed field with rising sun –Van Gogh

sunset9161

If Bees Are Few

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cornbee

beeblu

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
~Ray Bradbury

Bees are having a rough time of it to the point of making the cover of Time Magazine this summer so when I see a honey or bumble bee doing its job, it is cause for celebration.

The world depends on the revery that brings the spicy smell of pollen from a million flowers to the lowly feet of the bee.
May it be, may it be.

We should only know such reverie.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, a
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
~Emily Dickinson

sunset8318

snaps

thistleblossom

yellowbunch

Tarnished

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thistlegrass2

In a patch of baked earth
At the crumbled cliff’s brink,
Where the parching of August
Has cracked a long chink,

Against the blue void
Of still sea and sky
Stands single a thistle,
Tall, tarnished, and dry.

Frayed leaves, spotted brown,
Head hoary and torn,
Was ever a weed
Upon earth so forlorn,

So solemnly gazed on
By the sun in his sheen
That prints in long shadow
Its raggedness lean?

From the sky comes no laughter,
From earth not a moan.
Erect stands the thistle,
Its seeds abroad blown.
~Robert Laurence Binyon –“The Thistle”