Tiffany Dawn Smith: May 2021

Sunday, May 23, 2021

Sundown in the Okanogan Highlands

A yellow-headed blackbird

Eastern red-winged blackbird

Deer on the hillside

I could watch the interplay of sun and cloud dancing across the Okanogan Highlands for hours.

A yellow-headed blackbird sounding his distinct song.

A yellow-headed blackbird at Molson Lake.

Pflug Mansion - John Pflug had a dream of building a lovely German style home for his growing family. He began building in the summer of 1908. Money was scarce for all early homesteaders, so he hired no help and did all the work himself. He hauled all the materials from a sawmill about ten miles away with only a team and wagon. He never finished his dream house, but the family lived for several years in a part of the house that was finished. The house has been vacant since 1921.

An old homesteader's cabin from long ago.

A serene road through the Okanogan Highlands.

Another old homestead, from a whole 'nother time, still standing.

Friday, May 21, 2021

These three

These three should we mind ourselves closely over if we wish to draw closer to God:

attachment
fear
anger.

I guess it all boils down to attachment, really. At the foundation, it is attachment that provokes fear and anger.

Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 4, verse 10: Being freed from attachment, fear, and anger, becoming fully absorbed in Me, and taking refuge in Me, many persons in the past became purified by knowledge of Me, and thus they attained My divine love.

“Nonadaptation” by Czeslaw Milosz

"I was not made to live anywhere except in paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
Whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,
but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries
For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe
and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,
under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.
I have not loved a woman with my five senses.
I only wanted from her my sister, from before the banishment.
And I respected religion, for on this earth of pain
it was a funereal and a propitiatory song."

"On Urge to Withdraw" by Naida Muslic

"The withdrawal from the world - into forests as a mad mystic who plays lute to birds and visits the towns only to scandalise and scare people who were too adapted to the world and its ways, seemed the only way to exit the wheel of samsara. I felt aged - like I've already seen it all, had hundreds of children and husbands and wives, like I've been a criminal, a priest, a queen, a prostitute, and there was nothing left for me to be anymore. All the roles seemed too familiar and already explored and lived. It wasn't nihilism that was behind the urge to withdraw - it was inability to see any evidence of my belief that there had to be more to life than dying with a stomach more full than you started with."