RON HENGGELER

December 24, 2024
Winter's Solstice and Christmas Contemplations 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

(From A TALE OF TWO CITIES by Charles Dickens)

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

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The solution to the problem of the day is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the divinity within.

Hazard Inayat Khan

It is the Christmas time:
And up and down 'twixt heaven and earth,
In glorious grief and solemn mirth,
The shining angels climb.

Dinah Maria Mulock

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

“My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?”

Bob Hope

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

If you're reading this...

Congratulations, you're alive.

If that's not something to smile about,

then I don't know what is.

Chad Sugg

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

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

Rene Magritte

"One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day. Don't clean it up too quickly." 

Andy Rooney

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

When you're in love with a city, you grope for shadows that vanish at first touch.

Herb Caen

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

Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful. 

Norman Vincent Peale

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

Anne Frank

Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.

Winston Churchill

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

May Peace be your gift at Christmas and your blessing all year through!

~Author Unknown

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

I went to San Francisco 

I saw the bridges high,  

Spun across the water 

Like cobwebs in the sky. 

Langston Hughes

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

~Washington Irving

May Light always surround you:
Hope kindle and rebound you.
May your Hurts turn to Healing;
Your Heart embrace Feeling.
May Wounds become Wisdom;
Every Kindness a Prism.
May Laughter infect you;
Your Passion resurrect you.
May Goodness inspire 
your Deepest Desires.
Through all that you Reach For, 
May your arms Never Tire.

D.Simone

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

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

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

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

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

Charles Dickens

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

Shut your eyes and see.

James Joyce

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

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

We ring the bells and we raise the strain
We hang up garlands everywhere
And bid the tapers twinkle fair,
And feast and frolic — and then we go
Back to the same old lives again.
~Susan Coolidge

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Socrates

Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.

Hans Christian Andersen

We are a landscape of all we have seen. 

Isamu Noguchi

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

Ludwig von Beethoven

We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. 

William Shakespeare

The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much. 

Annie Leibovitz

“I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.

Ernest Holmes

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

“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

“Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.”
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

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

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Edward Weston

At Christmas, all roads lead home. 

Marjorie Holmes

Color is the fruit of life. 

Guillaume Apollinaire

Christmas — that magic blanket that wraps itself about us, that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance. It may weave a spell of nostalgia. Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance — a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved. 

~Augusta E. Rundel

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

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

To the one who knows how to look and feel, every moment of this free wandering life is an enchantment.

Alexandra David Neel

In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, 
And all you behold, though it appears without, 
It is within, in your imagination, 
Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow. 

William Blake

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

“Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart…filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.”

Bess Streeter Aldrich, Song of Years

You just have to live and life will give you pictures. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Every hour of every day is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

Walt Whitman

Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas. 

Calvin Coolidge

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Margaret Mead

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

Gerald Way

How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!

Benjamin Franklin

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

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

Jane Goodall

“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

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

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

First in rapture
And first in beauty
Wayward, passionate, brave
Glad of life God gave.
The sea-winds are her kiss,
And the seagull is her dove.
Cleanly and strongly she is--
My cool, grey city of love.
                            

George Sterling

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

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

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

Beethoven

Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.

Jane Goodall

Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.

Jack Kerouac

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.

Euripides

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

Emily Dickinson

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

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Christmas is a necessity. There has to be at least one day of the year to remind us that we're here for something else besides ourselves.

Eric Sevareid

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

Aaron Rose

“Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder

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

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. 

Susan Sontag 

Don't shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like. 

David Alan Harvey

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself. 

William Blake

RH 

Omaha, Nebraska 

1957

RH 

San Francisco, California 

That City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand. 

Robert Louis Stevenson