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"God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars."
Author unknown, commonly attributed to Martin Luther
"Look at the flowers - for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are."
Osho
"The poetry of the earth is never dead."
John Keats
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"There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second."
Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts, 1931
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED June 22, 2012.
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"If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures?"
Martin Gardner
"Life has loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things, blue waves whitened on a cliff, soaring fire that sways and sings, and children's faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup."
Sara Teasdale
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED July 23, 2012.
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"What a severe yet master artist old Winter is.... No longer the canvas and the pigments, but the marble and the chisel."
John Burroughs, "The Snow-Walkers," 1866
Last garden flowers of the year...
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"There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper."
James Carroll
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"O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain'd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers."
William Blake
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED November 10, 2012.
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"He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment."
Meister Eckhart
"The essence of the Way is detachment."
Bodhidharma
© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED September 7, 2011.
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"Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source."
Leo Tolstoy
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"He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“I need the shade of blue that rips your heart out. You don't see that type of blue around here.”
Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon
"Okay, this was kissing. Serious kissing. Not just a kiss before moving out, not a good-bye, this was Hello, sexy, and wow, she’d never even suspected that it could feel this way.”
Rachel Caine, Glass Houses
"COME slowly, Eden!
Lips unused to thee..."
Emily Dickinson (1830–86)
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED March 14, 2013.
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“Music before all else,
and for that choose the irregular,
which is vaguer and melts better into the air...”
Paul Verlaine
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Yerba mate (also spelled in English as maté, from the Spanish: yerba mate, Portuguese: erva-mate, binomial name Ilex paraguariensis, is a species of holly (family Aquifoliaceae), well-known as the source of the mate beverage, which is native to subtropical South America in northeastern Argentina, Bolivia, southern Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. It was first used and cultivated by the Guaraní people, also in some Tupí people communities in southern Brazil, prior to the European colonization. It was scientifically classified by the Swiss botanist Moses Bertoni, who settled in Paraguay in 1895.
" I reached the place of our bivouac by sunset and drinking much mate, soon made up my bed for the night. The wind was very strong and cold, but I never slept more comfortably."
Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED December 29, 2011.
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The story of the creation of Turkish Delight (lokum) begins in the late 1700s, when Ali Muhiddin Hacı Bekir, confectioner to the imperial court in Istanbul, listens to the sultan rant: "Hard candy! I'm tired of hard candy!" the sultan growled as he cracked a tooth on yet another sourball. "I demand soft candy!"
...more about Rahat lokum ("comfortable morsel"), nowadays called simply lokum, or Turkish Delight you can see here:
www.turkeytravelplanner.com/details/Food/TurkishDelight.html
© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED February 8, 2012.
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"The holly and the ivy
Are plants that are well known
Of all the trees that grow in the woods
The holly bears the crown."
[Unknown. The Holly and the Ivy (l. 1-4). . . Oxford Book of English Traditional Verse, The. Frederick Woods, ed. (1983) Oxford University Press.]
Ilex is a genus of 400 to 600 species of flowering plants in the family Aquifoliaceae, and the only living genus in that family. The species are evergreen and deciduous trees, shrubs, and climbers from tropics to temperate zones worldwide. Originally the name of "ilex" was that of the european species (Ilex aquifolium ), many representatives of the genus Ilex were also called by the common name Holly because of the obvious resemblance. In Roman times, the Roman people in Latin language originally designated as Ilex the evergreen oak, named today scientifically (Quercus ilex). The leaves of the Holly actually recall those of the oak. Also Ilex have small berries named drupes. The fruit is a berry, usually red but is red to brown to black, rarely green or yellow. The "bones" contain up to ten seeds each. (from Wikipedia)
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“Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.”
Rabindranath Tagore
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"A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor -- such is my idea of happiness."
Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
"And when we consider that ... all other earthly hues — every stately or lovely emblazoning — the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot..."
Herman Melville
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"Gravitation has existed on earth since we do not know when. It had its origin along with the Creation of the Earth."
Sri Sathya Sai Baba
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"Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,
We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!”
Humbert Wolfe
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"The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness."
Jessamyn West
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"Why doe ye weep, sweet babes? Can tears
Speak griefe in you,
Who were but borne
Just as the modest morne
Teemed her refreshing dew?"
Robert Herrick
The genus Muscari, commonly and collectively known as grape hyacinths, are a group of perennial plants native to Eurasia that produce spikes of dense, most commonly blue, urn-shaped flowers resembling bunches of grapes in the spring.
The Muscari have originated in the old world. The term muscari comes from the Latin muscus, since the scent is said to resemble musk.
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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "tangerine" was originally an adjective meaning "Of or pertaining to, or native of Tangier, a seaport in Morocco, on the Strait of Gibraltar" and "a native of Tangier." The OED cites this usage from Addison's The Tatler in 1710 with similar uses from the 1800s. The adjective was applied to the fruit, once known scientifically as "Citrus nobilis var. Tangeriana" which grew in the region of Tangiers.
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"For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Old Player
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Anthurium is a large genus of about 600–800 (possibly 1,000) species of flowering plants, belonging to the arum family (Araceae). Anthurium can also be called "flamingo flower" or "boy flower", both referring to the structure of the spathe and spadix.The Anthurium was discovered in 1876 in Colombia.
"...it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED April 1, 2013.
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"My Love stands
Patiently
Like a tree that waits to be kissed
By the rays of your sun
Or to be touched
By the Light
Of your glowing moon
I am here
To cherish all that you bring
I shed my leaves in your Winter
And grow them back in your Spring"
Juno Cristi
www.organicsoul.com/my-love-stands-patiently-like-a-tree-...
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"Nuclear apocalypse - who do you need? Actors are probably not top of the list. What can I do for you? I can pretend to be somebody who can grow you some nice crops."
Christian Bale
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(Lily Of The Valley In Fall)
Convallaria majalis commonly known as the lily-of-the-valley, is a poisonous woodland flowering plant native throughout the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere in Asia and Europe. The flowers are white tepals (rarely pink), bell-shaped, 5–10 mm diameter, and sweetly scented; flowering is in late spring, in mild winters in the Northern Hemisphere it is in early March. The fruit is a small orange-red berry 5–7 mm diameter that contains a few large whitish to brownish colored seeds that dry to a clear translucent round bead 1–3 mm wide.
Other names include May lily, May bells, Our Lady's tears, Mary's tears, lily constancy, ladder-to-heaven, male lily, and muguet (French).
"When observed calmly,
all things have their fulfillment."
Matsuo Bashō
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"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
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"All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense."
Robert Anton Wilson
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED November 28, 2012.
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"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know."
Diane Arbus
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED March 31, 2013.
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“The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.”
Walter Mosley, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
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“Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
["The Village Blacksmith"
From Ballads And Other Poems]
www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/longfellow/village_blacksm...
"Just then return'd at shut of evening flowers."
John Milton
"The principal person in a picture is light."
Edouard Manet
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Some blizzards come without warning, and with such ferocity that little can survive. In Texas, they call these storms Blue Northers. The Blue Norther is a weather phenomenon common to large areas of the world where warm, humid weather is the norm. One of its distinguishing features is its sudden, drastic temperature change. The storms generally hit in November, February, or March. The day is unseasonably warm, then suddenly the air is freezing with extreme blizzard conditions bringing clarity to the term "cold snap." When the blizzard passes, there is a period of bright blue skies with much cooler daily temperatures. The term Blue Norther originated in Texas. According to The Texas Handbook Online, the name could derive from the deep blue appearance of the storm's leading edge as it moves across the land.
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"They are not long, the days of wine and roses."
Ernest Dowson
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"...a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."
Madeleine L'Engle
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"In music the passions enjoy themselves."
Friedrich Nietzsche
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"I enjoyed the meetings, too. It was like having friends."
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED October 21, 2012.
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"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than
the risk it took to blossom."
Anais Nin
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""The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life."
Jean Giraudoux
"In my garden there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful."
Abram L. Urban
© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED June 7, 2011.
"I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know."
Mitch Albom, For One More Day
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"To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders."
Lao Tzu
"Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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"It is the hour when from the boughs
The nightingale's high note is heard;
It is the hour when lovers' vows
Seem sweet in every whispered word;
And gentle winds, and waters near,
Make music to the lonely ear.
Each flower the dews have lightly wet,
And in the sky the stars are met,
And on the wave is deeper blue,
And on the leaf a browner hue,
And in the heaven that clear obscure,
So softly dark, and darkly pure.
Which follows the decline of day,
As twilight melts beneath the moon away."
Lord Byron
"Then comes the hour the poet loves." (George Croly)
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED June 19, 2012.
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"Love me in the Springtime, when all is green and new,
Love me in the Summer, when the sky is oh so blue,
Love me in the Autumn, when the leaves are turning brown,
Love me in the Winter, when the snow is falling down.
Love me when I'm happy, and even when I'm sad,
Love me when I'm good, or when I'm oh so bad,
Love me when I'm pretty, or if my face is plain,
Love me when I'm feeling good, or when I'm feeling pain..."
Amanda Nicole Martinez
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED February 14, 2012.
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"Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering." (Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne)
"Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop."
Ovid
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© Copyright Natalie Panga - All rights reserved. EXPLORED August 17, 2012.
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“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
Emily Dickinson
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