...and while he waited for Piglet not to answer, he jumped up and down to keep warm, and a hum came suddenly into his head, which seemed to him a Good Hum, such as is Hummed Hopefully to Others.

  

The more it snows

          (Tiddely pom),

  The more it goes

          (Tiddely pom),

  The more it goes

          (Tiddely pom),

      On snowing

And nobody knows

          (Tiddely pom),

How cold my toes

          (Tiddely pom),

How cold my toes

          (Tiddely pom),

      Are growing. 

A. A. Milne
From House at Pooh Corner

I cultivate this beard not for the usual given reasons of skin trouble or pain of shaving, nor for the secret purpose of covering a weak chin, but as pure unblushing decoration, much as a peacock finds pleasure in his tail. And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.


John Steinbeck
From: Travels with Charley

How Is It That the Snow

BY ROBERT HAIGHT

How is it that the snow   

amplifies the silence,   

slathers the black bark on limbs,   

heaps along the brush rows?   

Some deer have stood on their hind legs   

to pull the berries down.   

Now they are ghosts along the path,   

snow flecked with red wine stains.   

This silence in the timbers.   

A woodpecker on one of the trees   

taps out its story,   

stopping now and then in the lapse   

of one white moment into another.

 

And He said:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and the daughters of Life's longing for itself. 

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. 

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. 

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

- Kahlil Gibran

From The Prophet

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing

As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult

Trick of living, and finding where you are.

- Mary Oliver

Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth. 

Isaiah 5:8

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect. Respect - that's the word. One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns.

-John Steinbeck
Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Photo from a trip to the Muir Woods near San Fran, CA over Thanksgiving and text from a book filled with wisdom I happened to be reading at the time. A book I will be quoting often in coming posts I feel.