Fugitive Image - Missoula, Montana

"...Yet mental images play an important part in my prayers.... 
But they seem to help me most when they are most fugitive 
and fragmentary—rising and bursting like bubbles in champagne or 
wheeling like rooks in a windy sky: contradicting one another (in logic) as the 
crowded metaphors of a swift poet may do. 

Fix on any one, and it goes dead. 

You must do as Blake would do with a joy; kiss it as it flies...."

- from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, page 86, by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Winter Quiet Things 2 - Missoula, Montana

"God's voice is still and quiet and easily buried under an avalanche of clamour."

 - Charles Stanley

Freelance Feather - Missoula, Montana

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul 
And sings the tune without the words 
And never stops at all..."

- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), 
from “Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)

(Part of the reason I adore this poem is because my dear Sis #2 shared it with me as encouragement many, many moons ago.Thanks, sissy, for a melodic and enduring reminder of truth.)

My Little Boat (On Flathead Lake), Polson, Montana

"Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it." - David Lee Roth (Possibly a mis-quote)

And some days, happiness aplenty is found in watching the calm bobbing progress of a wee vessel comprised of a seagull feather mast wedged into a shoredrifted scrap of pine bark.

Easter Wings, Missoula, Montana

Easter Wings

By George Herbert 1593–1633

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,

      Though foolishly he lost the same,

            Decaying more and more,

                  Till he became

                        Most poore:

                        With thee

                  O let me rise

            As larks, harmoniously,

      And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne

      And still with sicknesses and shame.

            Thou didst so punish sinne,

                  That I became

                        Most thinne.

                        With thee

                  Let me combine,

            And feel thy victorie:

         For, if I imp my wing on thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

(Note: Be sure to read the archaic definition of "imp", as relates to falconry.
And check out the cool old manuscripts and discussion at the link in the poem title.)