Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.
—Tennessee Williams
I live in Florida, and it’s a beautiful place, especially when you get away from the big cities and the Disneyfication of everything. Whenever I’m not working, reading, writing, or procuring poetic material for this site, you’ll probably find me roaming the backcountry of Old Florida—places where time doesn’t move.
I like abandoned places, the decay of a bygone era, swamps and thickets, blooming magnolias, and palm tree sunsets—places on the outskirts that tend to wash away the grime of too much civilization.
A few times a year, I’ll grab my camera, a tent, and a few essentials and go out and explore the untainted landscape of my home state. With little, the spirit is more. To get out there and taste the fruits of the natural world where people are scarce, and beauty is endless. That’s where it’s at for me.
Anyway, today’s post is mostly visual. I wanted to share a few recently captured images during my wanderings. Marc Riboud once reminded us that “taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”
Indeed it is. I hope you enjoy it.
“I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force--a wild pain and decay--also accompanies everything.”
― David Lynch
“Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.”
― William S. Burroughs
“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
― Henry Miller
I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac. — Bob Dylan
I broke with the sun and stars. I let the world go. I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know. I made the journey, bought the useless, found the indefinite, And my heart is the same as it was: a sky and a desert. —Fernando Pessoa
I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth. -- Steve McQueen
"The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." ~ Ken Kesey
“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
― Robert Frank
“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
― John Lubbock
“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” ― Mary Oliver
“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”
― Osho
“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore
He went to sea in a thimble of poetry without sail or oars or anchor. What chance do I have, he thought? Hundreds of thousands of moons have drowned out here and there are no gravestones. — Jim Harrison
“Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror but my God you’re alive and it’s spectacular.”
~ Joseph Campbell
“I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion.”
—J.A. Baker
“The path to all great things passes through silence.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
The dream of my life Is to lie down by a slow river And stare at the light in the trees To learn something by being nothing A little while but the rich Lens of attention. - Mary Oliver
"Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life."
~ Hermann Hesse
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Love this marriage of words and pictures.
Absolutely love it. For some reason, as I was absorbing your combination of selected photos and quotes, Blue Oyster Cult's song "Florida Man," from their sublime 2020 album THE SYMBOL REMAINS, began playing in my head. Though it's about something quite different than the beauty and mystery that are the focus of your post, maybe its lyrics play off the vibe in obscurely meaningful ways? They do for me, at least. Invocation of a mystery of another sort.
"Florida Man" by Blue Oyster Cult (lyrics by the great John Shirley)
Should you settle down in the Sunshine State?
You should know of its tangled fate
How the conquistador came to Florida
Long before it had a name
The medicine man of the Seminole
Knelt by the sacred flame and cursed the soul
Of the conquistador
And his son, and his sons, and the young ones
Of the Florida man
Down at the mall, where the boas crawl
Ted makes love to a concrete wall
His brother Red said his Uncle Ned
Found Elvis in a loaf of bread
High on meth, there's little Beth
The neighbor's cat is on her breath
Dan dreams he's got red wings of fire
He's waking and shaking on a power wire
Slim sees his face on a moonlit wave
He grabs a shovel and digs his own grave
Lee hates plate glass, he drives right through it
Said Alice's caterpillar made him do it
A Miami nurse snatches a purse
And drives down the freeway in reverse
Phil asks the cops to test his drugs
After they find him hiding under a rug
Don't you laugh, it could be you
The Florida curse always comes true
You can jeer, but you don't understand
Any fragile soul can be a Florida man