Robert Brewer’s prompt for today, at the Writers Digest poetry blog, is to write a book-inspired poem. I’m not quite sure where this poem comes from, but the poem itself is a book, divided into chapters:
Chapter 1
You found her in the garden
flirting with the goldenrod.
The next day she vanished
before your very eyes
in the sparkling autumn sun.
Chapter 2
You searched for her through
each successive November.
You ran down time’s vast corridors
calling her name into doorways.
Chapter 3
It was in the church ruins
where you finally found her
singing an ancient hymn of Inanna
to the ravens nesting on the altar.
Chapter 4
She did not run or try to hide
but she spoke your name
and the golden flowers burst
suddenly from the cracks in the floor.
Gratitude List:
1. Someone told me today that I bring with me the sense that it’s okay to be weird, and that might be one of the best compliments I have ever received.
2. Transformations
3. The vulture with wings open on the old snag on 30
4. Oak leaves falling like rain
5. So many circles of beautiful people!
May we walk in Beauty!
“Safety is not the absence of threat.
It is the presence of connection.” —Gabor Maté
“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan
Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison
“You need not wade through the mists and bogs to reach the moon.
You need not climb a ladder of cobweb.
You need not ride the stallions that wicker in the sea’s pounding surf.
Draw back the curtain and open the window.
Breathe the bracing air and listen:
The whinny of an owl, the click of the bat,
The grunt of a buck and the distant roar of the train.
The full moon will spill a milky road before you.
That is all the pathway you will need.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider
“The word is the making of the world.” —Wallace Stevens
“Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“The leaves of the tree become as pages of the Sacred Book to one who is awake.”
—Hazrat Inayat Khan
“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” —Albert Einstein
“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” —Coretta Scott King
“When you feel the suffering of every living thing in your own heart, that is consciousness.” —Bhagavad Gita
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.”
―Naomi Shihab Nye
Mockingbird Chronicles 