Harmony and tranquility are difficult to find these days. All the more reason to seek and find solace in the stillness and beauty of nature.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough...
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide...
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again...
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more...
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room...
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Rhyming couplets are from A. E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad."
little tree, big rock...
rice-paper parosol...
Photos taken at Hakone Gardens, Saratoga, California.