Life is made up of marble and mud.
—–Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Trinity River was still boiling, but it had obviously been higher a couple days earlier. The dropping river left its burden of mud.
Soon enough all will be dust.
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
—- John LeCarre
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Trinity River
Dallas, Texas
“What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”
― Charles Baudelaire
Dallas from the Trinity River Bottoms
“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’s all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’m not jealous
because we’ve never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched.
—-Charles Bukowski
Fountain in a cool interior garden, New Orleans, Louisiana
“He was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all,
he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart,
with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without
judgement, without an opinion.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Trinity River in the Fall,
Dallas, Texas
“Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris
Water and Stones, Dallas, Texas
“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
“Learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician.”
― Orville Wright
Little Arkansas River, Wichita, Kansas
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them,—Ding-dong, bell.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Downtown Dallas, Texas
“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Water feature in a pocket park off of Ross Avenue,
Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 