May there be dancing in your days.
May there be smiles.
May there be feasting.
May there be softness in the eyes
of those who surround you.
May there be warmth.
May there be wisdom.
May you recall that the armor
you’ve been wearing
is not your true self,
but only a shell of protection.
May you have safety.
May you be brave.
And may you breathe Belonging
through the whole of your being
until every cell of you celebrates
your name: Beloved.
Gratitude List:
1. We did manage to carve some time and safe space with some of our beloved college friends. What a joy! Missing those who weren’t there, but feeling them present even in distance.
2. Learning from friends about the Friends (Quakers) makes me open myself to listening more attentively to the messages meant for me.
3. In the stillness is the dancing. Finding my way back to meditation and mindful breathing.
4. Learning and relearning, every year, every day, that it just takes one step. And then another. One by one. . .
5. Egg on English muffin for breakfast.
May we walk in Wisdom!
“Brew me a cup for a winter’s night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I’ll toast our bright eyes,
my sweetheart fair.” —Minna Thomas Antrim
“How do we go on living, when every day our hearts break anew? Whether your beloved are red-legged frogs, coho salmon, black terns, Sumatran tigers, or fat Guam partulas, or entire forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, or oceans, or the entire planet, the story is the same, the story of the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved.” —Derrick Jensen
“The Work. I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment. And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” —Peter Drucker
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly.” —Margaret Fuller
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” —T.S. Eliot
“So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”
― Naomi Klein
Mockingbird Chronicles 