GOD'S WORLD

I got the name for this blog from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:


GOD'S WORLD


O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

TULIPS - A POEM

Tulips

An age being mathematical, these flowers
Of linear stalks and spheroid blooms were prized
By men with wakened, speculative minds,
And when with mathematics they explored
The Macrocosm, and came at last to
The Vital Spirit of the World, and named it
Invisible Pure Fire, or, say, the Light,
The Tulips were the Light's receptacles.
The gold, the bronze, the red, the bright-swart
Tulips!
No emblems they for us who no more dream
Of mathematics burgeoning to light
With Newton's prism and Spinoza's lens,
Or Berkeley's ultimate, Invisible Pure Fire.
In colored state and carven brilliancy
We see them now, or, more illumined,
In sudden fieriness, as flowers fit
To go with vestments red on Pentecost.

- by Padraic Colum

Proud and tall and all the colors of the rainbow. 

This was in May. Tne tulips were at their
loveliest. 

....and more. Did you know that tulips are native
to Turkey? The first tulip to reach the Netherlands
was a gift of the Ottoman sultan to a Dutch royal or
high official. Today people associate tulips with
the Netherlands - when that honor rightly belongs
to Turkey, where the tulip is called LALE. 

More flowers in one of the Queen's many gardens. 

I got a special birthday present in 2005 -
a weekend in London with Kevin (from
Kevin). We strolled through London's
many gardens - something we hadn't done
in a very long time. 

Clear clear skies in July. 

............and morning.... 

Evening at Boracay. 

This, now, is a picture taken at the beach
in Boracay, a small island which is about a
5 hour trip from Iloilo City, where I'm from.
There didn't use to be electricity on the
island, and not very many people knew about
it, but now it is a very popular tourist destination. 

And another. It is so peaceful there, and so beautiful. 

Another view from that same beach. 

Some other pictures now: this is Megan sitting at a beach in Guimaras, in the
Philippines. See the white sand - soft and powdery. 

That's the apartment building next to ours. Our building is very similar. 

We stand by this tree when we wait for a cab to take us in to the city. 

Another tree in spring in our compound. 

These are the first pictures I took with my camera - a Kodak Z740 - which I got last year. I got the camera because it has a 10x optical zoom - so I can take close ups of nature and of people. This was a flowering tree in the garden behind our building, Akasya Apt., at a compound called Kortel Korusu, above the village of Arnavutkoy, in Istanbul.

Arnavutkoy is one of the villages along the jewel of Istanbul: the Bosphorus.

We don't have a sea view - because our building is not at the crest of the hill overlooking the Bosphorus. A sprawling house and compound walled in by red brick is. But where we are we are guarded by some very big and very old acacia trees. I will take a picture of those trees sometime...

......all sorts of birds come and rest or make their home on the trees, and every morning, almost every season, it seems, we wake up to birdsong.