RON HENGGELER

December 25, 2023
A Miscellany of Reflections and Impressions on Christmas Day

Oh friends, put aside these sounds! 
Let us be more civil to each other,
And speak more joyfully.

Beethoven

Music is the highest, most powerful, most overriding, of all the arts. In the presence of music, all the other arts take on the character of the music, not vice versa, and is capable of, and can produce in us, the finest, most delicate of possible human reactions. 

Mark Anstendig

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

You know there are moments such as these when time stands still and all you do is hold your breath and hope it will wait for you. 

Dorothea Lange

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

Joseph Campbell

We are a landscape of all we have seen. 

Isamu Noguchi

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.

Ludwig van Beethoven

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

Rumi 

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, every cubic inch of space is a miracle. 

Walt Whitman

Let us have music for Christmas … 
Sound the trumpet of joy and rebirth;
Let each of us try, with a song in our hearts,
To bring peace to men on earth.

Mildred L. Jarrell

It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.

Louisa May Alcott

When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

Buddha

Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act.

Dr. Seuss

I thought I saw the face of God.

George Frideric Handel

Handel's Messiah in Grace Cathedral

When we pay attention to nature's music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony.

Harat Inayat Khan

Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.

Hans Christian Andersen

It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters.

Amit Ray

It's been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don't suppose anybody really understands yet.

Jane Goodall

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness. 

Anne Frank

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home!

Charles Dickens

 The Pickwick Papers

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That's what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

Jane Goodall

I live and love in God's peculiar light.

Michelangelo

There is a Christmas song upon the air,
There is a joy innate within the heart;
An inner sense of peace, a holy light
Illumines life and sets these days apart.

Edna Greene Hines

Sing hey! Sing hey!
For Christmas Day;
Twine mistletoe and holly.
For a friendship glows
In winter snows,
And so let's all be jolly!

Author Unknown

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas;
Soon the bells will start,
And the thing that will make them ring
Is the carol that you sing
Right within your heart. 

Meredith Willson 

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

What I have in my heart and soul - must find a way out. That's the reason for music.

Ludwig von Beethoven

Christmas! ‘Tis the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.

Washington Irving

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

Emily Dickinson

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it's worth watching. 

Gerald Way

A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos. 

Henri Catrier-Bresson

Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light. 

Max Ernst

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. 

Rajneesh

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

This benefit of seeing...can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image...the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.

Dorothea Lange

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.

Dorothea Lange

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Marcus Aurelius

You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,

Love like you'll never be hurt,

Sing like there's nobody listening,

And live like it's heaven on earth.

William Purkey

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

Jacques Henri-Lartigue

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

Elliot Erwitt

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas;
Soon the bells will start,
And the thing that will make them ring
Is the carol that you sing
Right within your heart. 

Meredith Willson 

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men. 

Giorgio de Chirico

Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.

Jack Kerouac

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.

Larry Wilde 

The Merry Book of Christmas

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual. 

Edward Weston

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

Elliot Erwitt

Sing hey! Sing hey!
For Christmas Day;
Twine mistletoe and holly.
For a friendship glows
In winter snows,
And so let's all be jolly!

Author Unknown

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

'Twas Christmas broach'd the mightiest ale;
'Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man's heart through half the year.

Walter Scott

To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a physical and intellectual joy. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Christmas! ‘Tis the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.

Washington Irving

RH

Omaha, Nebraska

1957

RH

San Francisco, California

2023