Nimavenl - Nicole's Random Ramblings

Another weekend approaches and I am reminding myself that I still need to update my blog to add the right photos to not just one but two "Photo Challenge" posts. Actually, I haven't even posted the second Challenge post yet - even though it was supposed to be on my blog some five days ago - and still need to do that. How bad is that? I promised myself and my readers / visitors that I'd post photos every weekend yet haven't done so. Which means I've let myself down, and my readers and visitors too. As I go through my emails and read articles online, I try to gently nudge myself towards my laptop's "Pictures" folder. That's where the photos live once I've downloaded them from my camera onto my laptop. That's where I need to go. That's where I need to direct my attention. Yet knowing I need to do something and actually doing it are two very different things. I'm not usually this bad with sticking to my promises, with following ...

These quotes were all found through Goodreads' Popular Quotes section. “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson “We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods “The poetry of the earth is never dead.” ― John Keats “I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.” ― E.B. White, Letters of E. B. White “Looking at beauty in the world, is the first step of purifying the mind.” ― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations “We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have...

Reading about ongoing acts of terror and destruction around the world and people who use their interpretation of religious teachings as an excuse to hurt or kill others makes me wonder about humanity, makes me wonder if we are really as smart, special and evolved as we like to believe. With all we think we know, with all we've learnt about the world and about the universe, everything we've achieved in fields like science, technology and medicine, somehow many of us still seem to believe that it is right or just to kill living beings, to keep people as slaves, to treat others as property and hurt people for not following rules some believe are right. Last week, I wrote this post entitled Violence, Death, Destruction... in which I wrote about a number of horrible attacks that took place, attacks by people who support terror, brutality and injustice. Wanting to write about what's going on in the world yet desiring to write something positive and inspiring instead of a do...

In America, nine people were brutally murdered yesterday in a church in Charleston, North Carolina. Horrible, unbelievable. My Twitter feed hasn't stopped telling me about it, newspapers are writing about it, people are blogging about it. Nine people who were not fighting or making war or killing or maiming or hurting others. Nine people, present in a house of worship. Non-combatants. Just people. Like you and me. Now dead because one man wanted to kill them. Perhaps he believed he should, perhaps he thought it was his right, perhaps he was mentally unstable, perhaps he was a very disturbed SOB. I don't know. I do know that nine innocent people are dead because someone chose to kill them. Nine black people are dead, because one white man chose to kill them. It makes me so sad yet so angry to live in a world where people do this to each other. We are all human, all one huge and extremely diverse family, all one people. And yesterday one human being chose to kill nine of his fami...

This photo by Will Gater reminds me of a Vincent van Gogh painting. How cool and amazing and stunning and beautiful is the universe we live in?! Down below on earth, we fight and argue, we kill and destroy, we rape and pillage. Yet far above, far away from our little lives, there is the sun. Older than any of us, older than our earliest ancestors, even older than the planet we call home. Right now, I'm taking a moment to appreciate that big light in the sky, to look at this image and remind myself that compared to the sun, big and vast and old yet so immensely powerful, we are but babies. Here's a white-light solar filter pic of the sunspot causing all the excitement today (AR2371) http://t.co/4n3KJpbFmS pic.twitter.com/wFBX4JL0M9 — Will Gater (@willgater) June 19, 2015

This made me laugh. And nod. A lot. And exclaim "Oh God, that's amazing" in a high-pitched voice. Not sure why that last bit was important but hey, I felt like tellin' the world... A photo posted by Kristin Chenoweth (@kchenoweth) on Apr 15, 2015 at 10:25pm PDT

Such a simple message... Yet so hard for so many... Different does not equal wrong or less. Different simply means unique and special!   Don't Hate What You Don't Understand! #imagequote #quoteoftheday pic.twitter.com/R7zjfZnJxm — The Quote Today (@TheQuoteToday) June 10, 2015

These words were written thousands of years ago, in a book known and read by millions upon millions over the years - possible the most well-known book in the entire world. This knowledge is not something we only figured out yesterday, so to speak. How sad that humanity still doesn't seem to get this basic truth. “Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath . . .” — Ecclesiastes 3:19 (A Quote from the Bible / Tanakh) The heartbreaking effects that humans have on our planet | Mashable Providing a little more context: I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all c...

Vision in Silver by Anne Bishop My rating: 5 of 5 stars I very much enjoyed this book and loved reading more of the adventures of the well-written characters in this series. Meg's development was very interesting to read about; getting to know more of the Others was lots of fun and the way the blood prophets learn to find their place in the world made me both happy and sad. I would love to live in this world and get to know the many Others who inhabit it. The way the Others see the world makes so much more sense than the way the humans live and makes me wish humanity in the real world thought more like the Others in this book. Loving the land and living in harmony with nature and each other makes so much more sense than attempting to destroy, dominate and control both the planet and other beings. I wrote this last month about the same book and thought I'd include it in this review: Brilliant. Awesome. Amazing. Heart-wrenching. Sweet. I love Anne Bishop's work and the intri...

“I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress.”  —Ed Begley, Jr. The heartbreaking effects that humans have on our planet | Mashable

Nature in Yellow | Nimavenl Nature is beautiful. Each and every day. Each and every way. Just as we all are. Each and every day. Each and every way. Period. Our world is such a beautiful and amazing place, yet too often we disregard the beauty of nature and of humanity in favour of fighting, squabbling and making war. We oppress people and try to rule their lives, some we even try to kill because we don't agree with their ways, their thinking, their religion or simply because we don't like the colour of their skin. Will we ever learn to love, respect and cherish our fellow human beings, simply as they are? “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” ~ Nelson Mandela

Tree Branch, Blue Sky | Nimavenl Here's another two photos from last weekend's Photo Walk. Well really, it's two versions of the same photo - the original and the edited version. This is the third time this week I'm sharing photos of tree branches and I'm as happy with this photo (or should that be 'these photos'?) as with the other two. On the 3rd, I shared two photos, as today an original and an edited version . Two days ago (on the 4th) I only shared a single photo - I liked the edited version a little better than the (slightly more boring feeling) original, to be honest.   Am very much looking forward to another Photo Walk this weekend, just not in the same location! Am hoping to capture some urban scenes and landscapes this weekend as well as photos of nature - I love living in a city with buildings that are hundreds of years old and am looking forward to spending some more time enjoying those buildings and learning about their history! Tree ...

Some days I wonder if humanity is doomed to fail at being human and humane. Some days I wonder if Europe is gearing up for a do-over of the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties. Some days I wonder if our entire world will end in flames and fumes, dust and rubble. Some days I wonder if some trigger-happy madman will nuke the entire world to Kingdom Come. What are we doing to each other? Will we ever stop trying to kill and hurt other human beings? Will we ever learn that true world peace will only happen when we all learn to live together, when we learn to respect our fellow human beings and understand that our way may not be their way?

One only has to turn on the television or read the newspaper to realise our world is full of war, injustice, senseless hatred, racism, discrimination, murder and terrorism. We have brains capable of imagining how others might act, react, think and feel. We have books and movies which give us the opportunity to see the world from another's point of view or even from inside their hearts and minds. We have the internet and free online translation services that allow us to communicate with people from all over the world, no matter their language or home country. Yet even with books, movies and the internet to connect us and our human ability to imagine how others might think and feel, we haven't learned to live together in peace and prosperity, to share our planet together without bloodshed or violence, to coexist without trying to bend others to our will and our ways. Source: "Colour Blind" by Acvelyen | Deviant Art We are all human, yet relatively small differe...

"You were given this life because you are strong enough to live it" Post by Joshua Pierce .

Woke up today to my (ahum) lovely and (ahum ahum) considerate neighbours drilling into shared concrete walls, banging on shared walls, hammering away and - I can only imagine - generally having a good time pretending to be workers at a construction site instead of people who live inside a building they share with other people who all have their own lives.  It's not a fun way to wake up; being forced awake by things happening outside my own flat yet inside my building. I can't change anything about the banging and noise or the complete disregard my neighbours have for other people, however I can't get away from it either. Not without leaving the entire building, which means waking up, getting dressed and leaving the house to... to.... to try to go to sleep in a park or by the side of the road because sleeping inside my own house is impossible? Do they seriously not realise that their walls are also my walls? That when they start banging away, everyone else in the bu...

“ You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. ” ― Mahatma Gandhi