Twisted fun

Christmas ornament and some fun in Photoshop.

Fun is good.

     Dr. Seuss

Red jug

A jug fills drop by drop.

          Buddha

Danube sunrise

"What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?"

E. M Forster

Passau

"When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable.  It is designed to make its own people comfortable."
Clifton Fadiman

Prague alley

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."

Martin Buber

Mud

Photography Challenge week 46:  Mud

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Late autumn day

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonize.

George Eliot

Moss

In late autumn, it isn't easy to find colour, but it is there if one looks for it.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

John Muir

River travel

On a cold, windy, dreary day like today, having an abundance of photos to sort through is a pleasant diversion.

If you dam a river it stagnates.
Running water is beautiful water.
So be a channel.
           English proverb

First snow

For me, the first snow always brings mixed feelings.  It is a glimpse of what is to come for the next several months, but on the other hand, it offers a reprieve from the brown and gray world and makes everything look clean and crisp for a few hours.

"Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted days
The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil."

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Lotus Eaters.

Hosta leaves

November is a time when it's easy to feel like I live in a brown world; the time between vibrant fall colours and the first clean, white, snow.  I was struck today by how lovely the dead hosta leaves in my garden looked in the morning sun.  I decided that even brown can be beautiful.

The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilerating than any wine they tell of.

Henry David Thoreau

November sunrise

There is rhythm in the woods, and in the fields,

Nature yields:

And the harvest voices crying,

Blend with Autumn zephyrs sighing;

Tone and color, frost and fire,

Wings the nocturne Nature plays upon her lyre."

William Stanley Braithwaite, Lyric of Autumn