A Florence Scene

In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise.

         - Virgil Thomson

Best Routes

The best routes are the ones you haven't ridden. You could pedal the same loops year after year. Many people do, literally or figuratively. But to grow, you need new rides. Risks. Turn down lanes you've long seen but never traveled. Get lost once or twice. Live like this and you come to see unknown territory not as threatening, but as intriguing.     - Remy

Cycling in Umbertide, Italy

Bicycles in Florence

Home Again

The return from Italy was something of an endurance test, but no complaints.  Home safely.  Lots of images captured in Umbria and Tuscany in particular, the first couple to share I’ll post here today.

Truth

All truth passes through three stages.  First, it is ridiculed.  Second, it is violently opposed.  Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

-Schopenhauer

An Offering

Came across this from Elizabeth Elliot.  Good thought for Monday morning.

This job has been given to me to do. Therefore, it is a gift. Therefore, it is a privilege. Therefore, it is an offering I may make to God. Therefore, it is to be done gladly, if it is done for Him…Here, not somewhere else, I may learn God’s way. In this job, not in some other, God looks for faithfulness.

 

 

Love is...

Lately I’ve been going through images I’ve filed away - photographs I’ve taken over the past few years - trying to find a better way to organize them.  Putting a few up here day-to-day seems to make sense.

Also, today I came across this quote...off a twitter feed that posts comments from Tim Keller.

Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be.
- Tim Keller

Imagination

The imagination is among the chief glories of being human. When it is healthy and energetic, it ushers us into adoration and wonder, into the mysteries of God. When it is neurotic and sluggish, it turns people, millions of them, into parasites, copycats, and couch potatoes.  

- Eugene Peterson, Under the Predictable Planet

Street Artists

Images of street artists at work in Larimer Square.

Anything Will Help

On a frigid day last winter I saw this old man standing on a sidewalk between 17th and 18th just half a block from the world-famous Brown Palace Hotel where, at the moment I snapped this photograph, several limousines had stopped to drop off well-dressed passengers arriving to attend a champagne brunch.

A Memory In The Park

I walked with the dog through the park and across the baseball diamond this afternoon.  All summer the kids came to play, but it was quiet today.  With autumn and school they don’t come anymore.  But this ball was left behind.

Something In The Air

I was standing at the gas pump when I realized it for the first time; that ever so slight chill that slips in on a breeze this time of year.  It was still a beautiful, warm, sunny day overall, but for just a moment I could feel it.  For me, autumn is as much an emotion as a season.  It doesn’t catch me off guard, exactly, yet somehow I find I’m not really expecting it either.  The grass is still green and the trees spread across the hillsides are only just beginning to display fall color, but there it was.  I could feel it in the air. 

“It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.”  - P.D. James

Received 63 - Sent 8

I was reading several brief profiles of notable people in which the writer detailed the number of emails each person receives on an average day and, in turn, sends.  The received typically outnumbered the sent by a large margin and it made me wonder if the same would be true of me.  So I poked through my email program’s received and sent folders, looking back over the past week or so and, it turns out, it is.  Who can keep up?

Yet I have stopped this evening to write this blog.  Why?

I seem to be at a stage when I most naturally end my thoughts and observations with a question mark.  Hmm.

Here’s an image I’ve had sitting in a file.  It didn’t make it into a gallery showing this month so I am dragging it out of the file to put here.  Where else?