"Among all those we have heard about and known, among all the past and present dwellers in the village I think the most remarkable was the blind naturalist, Annie Edmond. Even when she was past ninety, by feel and smell, she would identify wildflowers brought to her. By hearing she would identify birds. By feeling their bark and listening to the sound of the wind in their foliage, she would identify trees.....She was nine years old when the blizzard of 1888 stuck and she remembered vividly how great rollers, pulled by oxen, packed down the snow to open the roads for sleighs. Her memory for details of long-past events was particularly clear and accurate. This proved a great boon during the last twenty years of her life after unsuccessful eye operations had left her in darkness."In my life," she said, "I am so glad I stocked my mind with pleasant things to remember and think about."Many of those things concerned nature. From time to time Nellie and I used to take her "olfactory bouquets" made up of sweetfern, spicebush, yarrow, catnip, sassafras, bayberry, and other leaves and plants whose fragrance would bring back recollections of her earlier days in the out-of-doors...
Excerpted from an old favorite book - Edwin Way Teale's A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm (1974). More tidbits to follow after I finish my re-read.
The basic truth of happiness is not striving for a goal where you think it’ll be, but enjoy what you have.
ReplyDeleteCatchy sayings like, “Love the one you’re with”, and “It could be so much worse”, came from grasping the logic. We often dismiss those phrases as frou-frou but they evolved from sound thinking.
xoxoxoBruce
“Dharma… refers to the specific teachings that Gautama developed… The essence of these teachings (as expressed in a series of four short statements called the Four Noble Truths) is that we lock ourselves into a condition of suffering by wanting things to be different from what they are. We may desire things or conditions that do not currently exist; we may be dissatisfied with the ones that do. Any desire keeps us removed from the ability simply to accept ourselves and the conditions in which we find ourselves.
DeleteThe extension to this insight is an obvious one. If we can uproot our constant, frantic tendency to want things to be different, then we can bring an end to the pain and suffering that that tendency constantly creates.”
---- Will Johnson in The Posture of Meditation