We need to remind ourselves of the sheer beauty and poetry of our earth and its people and helping to diminish what gets in the way of our enjoying that beauty, refreshing our souls with renewed contact - and with the soul beauty of the human beings who offer us these projects! Some of them do not have websites of their own, but most do, and I include them. Especially take a look at the site of pictures taken of 9/11 and following - down on the bottom of this site.
Ashfield, Massachusetts in all its glorious seasons.
Connie Frisbee Houde's sunset picture of a fisherman on the Perfume River in Hue, Vietnam
Crop Circles, some so spectacular, it boggles the mind!
Global City Lights - NASA's night view of the planet, lit by tiny diamonds. Beautiful - and appalling, if you couple it with our country's greedy demands for even more energy consumption!
Labyrinths - sacred earth patterns from long ago
Monteverde cloud forest, Costa Rica
Mything Links, by Kathleen Jenks, PhD, an annotated and illustrated collection of worldwide links to mythologies, fairy tales & folklore, sacred art and traditions, with breath-taking images of mountains, streams, caves and labyrinths, among other aspects of landscape.
Volcanoes and Blizzards - and Fire and Ice - have an awesome beauty all their own.
WTC - http://camazotz.com/wtc/1.html - a set of 20 pictures taken by an amateur of the World Trade Center disaster - not really beautiful in any ordinary sense of the term, but totally awesome, and worth seeing! There are an additional 8 pictures after the first 20. The photographer's name is Mark Smith, and he offers explanatory notes for each picture. He says of his site:
After September 11th, I put up the following pages and pictures for family and friends who wanted to know what it was like to be in New York on that day. There were originally twenty pages. I added another eight pages a few weeks later.
The web being what it is, many other people have viewed them since. My thanks to everyone who emailed me afterward, and my apologies if I was unable to respond personally.
This is a personal site without advertising. Please don't create direct links to the images here.
There are 8 additional shots taken once a month during the next ten months following 9/11, when the first 20 were taken. Below this, he quotes E. B. White, written in 1949, as follows:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
It used to be that the Statue of Liberty was the sign-post that proclaimed New York and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty shares the role with Death. Along the East River, from the razed slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay, as though in a race with the spectral flight of planes, men are carving out the permanent headquarters of the United Nations -- the greatest housing project of them all. In its stride, New York takes on one more interior city, to shelter, this time, all governments, and to clear the slum called war.
» This race -- this race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man -- it sticks in all our heads. The city at last illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errands forestalled.
A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: "This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree." If it were to go, all would go -- this city, this mischevious and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death. »
-- E.B. White, Here Is New York [1949]
