Extraordinary Patience
The photos on this page (with one exception) were taken in the state of Rhode
Island.  It's the smallest state in the U.S. -- but the one with the longest name.
Officially, it is:  "The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations."
Please don't use the 'Send page' feature of your computer to
send this entire page in an e-mail message, document or pdf
format.  This distorts the layout and separates the page from
its source.  If you'd like to send it, please just send the link.
The link to this page is:
http://www.thepastwhispers.com/Rhode_Island.html
My son's family went to New Orleans' Audubon Zoo last week and brought me a
CD of photos they'd taken.  One was of a wall with a quote that I liked and I looked
it up online.  It turned out to be an excerpt from the text below, written by Robinson
Jeffers (1887-1962) about his adopted home, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
Rhode Island doesn't cover very much territory, but it boasts some of the most
beautiful coastal areas in New England.  The Nature Conservancy has included
Block Island as "one of the 12 last great places in the Western Hemisphere."
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place has been defaced with a crop of houses.
How beautiful it was when we first beheld it -
The prose below came to this Rhode Island page by the circuitous route of
Carmel, CA and New Orleans, LA.  Usually, I search through books or online for
the quotes, poems, etc. for Friday's Journals, but this one actually came to me
and it seemed to fit with Rhode Island's rugged and beautiful coastline.
Patience, patience, patience is what the sea teaches.  Patience and faith.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin, walled by clean cliffs;
No intrusion, but two or three horses pasturing,
And a few milk cows on the outcrop rockheads.
Now that scene's been spoiled.  Does it care?
Not even faintly.  It has all time.  It knows that people
Are a tide that swells and will one day ebb -
And all their works dissolve.
Meanwhile, the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs the cliffs.
As for us:  We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views and become confident -
As patient and confident as the rock and the ocean.
Don't wish me happiness, I don't expect to be happy all the time.  Wish me courage
and strength and a sense of humor.  I will need them all.  -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh