heart by Santōka Taneda

my heart is weary —
the mountains, the sea
are too beautiful

mountains by Santōka Taneda

"Westerners like to conquer mountains;
Orientals like to contemplate them.
As for me, I like to taste the mountains."

Tamara de Lempicka, Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti), 1928

William DeVaughn, Be Thankful For What You've Got

Spoon , The Ghost of you Lingers

Evelyn De Morgan, The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not, 1895

“We Must Cultivate Our Garden”

In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,   
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!   
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,   
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,   
And in broad day the midnight come again!   
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,   
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.   
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,   
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

"Real love is never perplexed, never qualifies, never rejects, never demands. It replenishes, by grace of restoring unlimited circulation. It burns, because it knows the true meaning of sacrifice. It is life illuminated." ~ Henry Miller

“To earn salvation one has to become inoculated with sin. One has to savor them all, the capital as well as the trivial sins. One has to earn death with all one’s appetites, refuse no poison, reject no experience however degrading or sordid. One has to come to the end of one’s forces, learn that one is a slave—in whatever realm—in order to desire emancipation.” ~ Henry Miller

Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of Orithyia by Boreas, 1692

She Wants Revenge, Tear You Apart

Eldzier Cortor, Dance Composition No. 34, 1971-1972

Lescop, La Nuit Americaine

Poni Hoax, Carrie Ann

Suzanne Valadon, The Naked Future, 1912

Suzanne Valadon, Naked on the red sofa, 1920

Antonio Bueno, Nude with flowers, 1947

Yoshihiro Tatsuki, from 'Eves', 1970