Water Lilies & Holiness - Placid Lake, Montana

“I think what people build can be very beautiful, but what God builds goes beyond beauty. 

You stand outside Notre Dame, say, and you marvel at the accomplishment, but you can't really connect. It's artificial, do you see? It's only a representation of something. Spirit, holiness, maybe even God. But it's not the thing itself. 
Out here, it's all there before you, around you. You're steeped in it, the real thing. Spirit. Holiness. God."
- Maria to young Henry Meloux in Thunder Bay, p. 127, by William Kent Krueger (Book #7 of Cork O'Connor Mystery Series)

Water Lily Pad Tiles - Placid Lake, Montana

 ...like so many roof tiles overlapping atop a mermaid family's cozy home...

Water Lilies - Placid Lake, Montana

"....Fair beds they seem’d of water-lily flakes

Clustering entrancingly in beryl lakes...."

-Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), from "A Vision of the Mermaids"

Leave Room For The Unknown -

"We don't really actually have that kind of control... our utter impatience with the unknown is, I think, a real liability for having the stamina to deal with this extraordinarily difficult time. I mean, I don't begrudge anybody, their terror of the unknown...remarking as a historian, I think there's a kind of shift... nobody has any idea what's going to happen next, you know, from the weather to anything else." - Jill Lepore, in CBC's The Current 6/9/2020 interview

Windflower, Close, Hamilton, Montana

This windflower blossom reminds me of water lilies opening in the sun.