Letter from Ansel Adams to his dear friend, Cedric Wright, June 10, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.

Ansel

Beaver Lake, Lakeview Park, Asheville, NC. 2018. Oil on panel. Gifted.

Breathe

Breathe and understand that you are alive.

Breathe and understand that everything is helping you.

Breathe and understand that you are the world.

Breathe in compassion and breathe out joy.

Breathe and be one with the air you breathe.

Breathe and be one with the flowing river.

Breathe and be one with the land you walk on,

Breathe and be the one with the fire that shines.

Breathe and discard the idea of birth and death.

Breathe and you will see that impermanence is life.

Breathe for your joy of being stable and serene.

Breathe so your pain flows.

Breathe to renew all the cells of the blood.

Breathe to renew the depths of consciousness.

Breathe and live in the here and now.

Breathe and everything you touch will be new and real.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

An atom in the universe of infinite possibilities

“In this moment, I’m aware, living as I do in this world, that I am an atom in the universe, possessing infinite possibilities of development… and I want to explore these possibilities.” — Hilma af Klint (October 1862 – 21 October 1944)

Untitled. Oil on canvas. 36 * 24 inches. (Misplaced)