Gratitude of Resistance Five:
Autumn Glory. Michelangelo clouds. Fierce breezes. Deeper, richer colors. Coolness. Maples afire. The swish of leaves. Woodsmoke.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitudes
Penny the Dog
Gratitude of Resistance Four:
Penny. Dogs. Interspecies communication. Jon was the first to notice the dog walking across the newly-harvested cornfield across from Landis Homes. We were on our way to eat lunch in the restaurant there with my parents and we’d just gotten out of the car. We watched her a moment. She was making a straight line, mostly, but she looked a little confused. We could see it in her aspect. When I crossed the road and spoke to her, she made a steady line toward me. As we approached each other and I was considering at what point I should kneel down to her, she made the first move, sitting down, hunching her shoulders, and tucking her head down to her paws. It was pretty clear that she was saying something like, “I think I have been a very bad dog, but I am lost and scared and I need your help.”
I found her phone number on her tag, and as I started to stand up to call, she saw Jon and the boys in the LH parking lot and made a happy beeline straight for them. Fortunately there was a break in traffic, so she got across. Jon lifted her into the back of the Prius and sat in the back while I drove down the road to the address listed on her tag. She didn’t want to stay in the way back alone, so she jumped over the seat and into Jon’s lap, where she proceeded to lick his face.
At her house, her person said that she is usually very good about staying in the yard, but that she thinks Penny was disoriented by the change in her view after the corn was harvested.
I’m not the kind of person who lives with a dog, but I love dogs, and the way this sweet little beagley person communicated with us yesterday was a delight. All’s well that ends well.
Good People
Gratitude of Resistance Three:
Good people doing good work. ASSETS Lancaster, and organization which trains and mentors and invests in small businesses. RAICES provides legal services for immigrants and asylum-seekers. The people who are traveling into Honduras to meet with and comfort and aid the asylum-seekers who are traveling north right now. The canvassers and door-knockers who talk to people about what they really want. You, doing your good work, smiling at your neighbor, picking up trash, writing letters, making change, believing in the best version of us all.
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estés
*****
“A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.” —Anton Chekhov
*****
“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.” —Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
*****
“I would like to think that everybody in America would think it’s wrong to spend all your time from a position of power vilifying people, questioning their patriotism, calling them enemies of the people and then suddenly pretending that you’re concerned about civility.” —Barack Obama, in Michigan
*****
“And then there are the cravings. Oh, la! ⠀
A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. ⠀
She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.⠀
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights ⠀
where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. ⠀
She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estés
*****
“It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little.”
—Ellen Bass
*****
“Blessed is this, the new day of slowly uncovering fog, the echoing song of ravens praising a break in the rains, the moon somewhere still quietly ripening, the calm of always receiving another chance.” —Toko-pa Turner
*****
“When we went to jail, we were setting our faces against the world, against things as they are, the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system which lives by war and by preparing for war.” —Dorothy Day
*****
“You want to be human. Be angry, it’s okay. But not to practice is not okay. To be angry, that is very human. And to learn how to smile at your anger and make peace with your anger is very nice. That is the whole thing—the meaning of the practice, of the learning. By taking a look at your anger it can be transformed into the kind of energy that you need—understanding and compassion. It is with negative energy that you can make the positive energy. A flower, although beautiful, will become compost someday, but if you know how to transform the compost back into the flower, then you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to worry about your anger because you know how to handle it—to embrace, to recognize, and to transform it. So this is what is possible.” —bell hooks
*****
“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.” —Frida Kahlo
Nourishing Myself with Great Care
Gratitude as Resistance Two:
Meeting the Goal. I try not to talk too much about things like weight loss in a public forum. My first goal–always–even though my inner world doesn’t always actually manage it, is to love my body like it is. As a teacher of teenaged women, I believe that young women desperately need models of women (especially round ones) who are comfortable in our skin. So I try, really hard, to avoid the subject of the D-word.
On the other side of that is a little problem I’ve been carrying around called the Trump Ten. In the months after the inauguration last year, I let myself eat whatever and however I wanted. I was The Comfort Eater. In three months, I added a solid ten pounds to my body. When it hit me, I thought I would just stop the comfort eating and go back to normal. Then I thought I would cut a meal a day and go back to normal. Then I decided that it was impossible to lose weight after 50.
But I kept carrying this extra ten pounds around, and now it felt like I was wearing the president and his team of destroyers around on my hips. (Honey, you’ve GOT to get rid of that!) And at the same time, I realized that my joints were achier than ever, that I was getting winded climbing stairs. Uh-oh. That’s not good.
So I got serious, did some research, and came up with an eating plan. I don’t call it the D-word. I call it Nourishing Myself with Great Care. I think I have been eating more, actually, than I was when I was skipping a meal. I’m defiant by nature and will never follow someone else’s plan entirely–I cobbled together some ideas that made sense to me. I whip butter and coconut oil into my coffee every morning. I eat something called a fat bomb for snacks. I eat a LOT of avocados. I eat less at supper than I used to, but I have the occasional cookie, the occasional bowl of ice cream. I know my hedonistic self enough to understand that without treats, no eating plan would be sustainable, especially when my new favorite show on Netflix is The Great British Baking Show.
I get hungry. A lot. But I’m learning that sometimes hunger actually means thirst. Sometimes it means boredom. And a lot of the time, it means angst or despair or worry or rage. I have to feel the feelings. Sometimes I would like to go back to covering them up with carbohydrates, but I’m trying to be like Rumi and welcome each feeling into the guesthouse of myself. In this day, when so many of the waters of the world are threatened, taking a long drink of water when I feel the aching hole inside can be like a magical or prayerful act of healing intention.
Yesterday, the scale told me that the Destroyers were gone, all ten pounds of Evil Administration. Gone. Two months of Paying Attention to eating, and I met my goal. That’s the first part of the gratitude.
But the second part is that last Wednesday as I was walking up the steps to my classroom, I realized that I was walking in the middle of the steps, not using the railing to drag myself up, not dreading the steps, not breathing heavily at the top. I still ache like a fifty-something, but the extra edge is gone. I think reducing sugar and grains has had a marvelous effect. I haven’t been diagnosed with arthritis, but it’s been in the family, and I would like to avoid it as long as I can. Also, my mother reminded me the other day that the empty carbohydrates in sugar and refined flour are implicated in depression. Again, while I have no diagnosis in that realm, I know how close I step to the chasms, and if a nourishing eating plan will keep me from the dangerous edges, I can keep to that.
This isn’t the first time in my life that I have done something like this. My pregnancy years pulled me out of the pattern of healthy nourishment, and while I have been somewhat careful in my eating, I never really went back to a serious intentional look at the sugar/flour content of my daily nourishment.
A small slice of pie, eaten with deep attention and intention, can give the same amount of pleasure as two slices eaten greedily. And now I can usually manage avoid the stupid calories of junky candy. If I am going to indulge, I want it to be something sublime. I still eat the second bowl of ice cream sometimes, and I might have two pieces of pie at a party or gathering if I feel like it. I need to defy, to break the rules at times. But it’s no longer a free-for-all, and in the long term, this way is safer for my physical and mental health.
Gratitude as Resistance
Perhaps I am going to sound a little like a conspiracy theorist here, but I think it holds pretty true, actually. Those who are in power, those trying to consolidate their economic and political power against the people, rely on our anxiety and fear, our disillusionment and angst, our impotent rage and our divisive talk, to paralyze us against positive and just action. I don’t think this means I have to entirely give up my outrage and worry, my despair and angst–they’re the feels I feel, and I won’t cut off my feelings. Still, I can surf them instead of getting sucked into their vortex–which is, I think, what the destroyers want of us.
I have practiced the writing of gratitude lists for about ten years now, on and off, sometimes religiously writing a list a day, sometimes settling into a weekly or bi-weekly pattern. As I have written before, this particular spiritual practice has helped to ground and deepen me, particularly in times of stress and rage and grief. In recent weeks, when the practice might have been extremely helpful, I have been very sparse in my gratitude-contemplations, and I think I have had trouble finding my way back to center. I think it correlates.
This morning, my friend Karen wrote that every day between now and Thanksgiving, she will write one simple gratitude as an act of resistance. That gives the Work of Gratitude a whole new layer of inner empowerment, doesn’t it? Gratitude as Resistance. What better way to resist the destroyers’ dependence on our paralysis?
In order to find my way back toward equilibrium, and to maintain the magical/prayerful intention of resistance, I will follow Karen’s wise example in the coming month and post One Gratitude as Resistance each day in the month leading up to Thanksgiving. Thank you, Karen, for leading me into a new space.
Gratitude One:
Guidance Counselors: Guidance Counselors are superheroes. I have no doubt that you save lives. As a teacher, I am comforted to know that you are there, a safety net, offering solace and help for students in their pain and troubles. At least twice this week, I have been able to rest in the knowledge that someone was taking care of a student who was in a crisis. And when I was helping a student perfect her college application essays, she kept telling me things that her guidance counselor had helped her to think about as she wrote. I’m glad you’re in my village, both my local school village, and in other schools.
May we walk in Beauty!
Here’s a little self-touting:
I’m actually not sure what it means. It’s not a publishing thing, and it doesn’t have prize money or certificates attached to it, but it’s satisfying. I try not to doubt my poetic voice, but when mostly what I have in response to sending poems for publication is a long list of rejections, I sometimes struggle to keep me sense of my poetic self intact. So it was a good morale boost for me to discover yesterday, sort of by accident, that I had won last year’s Poetic Asides November Poem-a-Day Challenge Chapbook contest. The little book is called Shapeshifting, and it contains thirteen poems that I wrote during last November’s challenge.
Across the River
As of today, nearly 250 of the children abducted by the Trump/Sessions/Miller policy of family border separation remain in detention camps and facilities, months after the debacle occurred.
I carried my bones across the river and into the arms of the border patrol.
I laid my child in the hollow between sand-hills where she would be hidden.
I placed her in the quiet shade of a cactus where the little wren would sing to her.
I carried her on my back when the wind drove sand in our faces.
I tore her from the powerful arms of the river, and up the far bank
but now
she is lost in the long white hallways,
lost in the echoing rooms.
The vultures have carried her bones
to a far-off place
and all I can hear
is the screaming of sirens.
The sound fills up my bones.
There is no color but sound,
no feeling but the wailing of sirens,
the screeching and scraping,
the fierce clang of doors,
the cold bars of cages.
I carried my child to the river and now I am empty sky filled with ash.
My bones have turned to ashes and my dreams have fled
across the desert like birds.
There is nothing in this hollow place but sirens and slamming doors and questions,
the godawful questions–and a wailing that will not be silenced.
The gods have all died, blown across the sands like so much ash,
fled deep into soil like the water that has gone from this place.
Mother Mary, who sheltered us, is cast into a cage
and her child is walking alone in the maze of hallways
where she cannot reach him.
Where now is the mother?
Where is the child?
Where is the voice that will call to me
through this cacophony?
Where is the map through this desert?
Where is the red thread to follow in the wilderness?
The end is here.
The end is here.
The end is here.
And all the little birds have flown beyond the river.
I carried my bones across the river and the waters did not close about me.
I carried my child through the desert and now my story has ended.
The ashes swirl and eddy in the wind, borne into the raging arms of the river.
This is the end.
This is the end.
This is the end.
Gratitude List:
1. Making time to get some of this angst into a poem. I can breathe a little better.
2. Magical, prayerful acts. Granny squares have a really satisfying rhythm of threes: the steps of a double crochet are threes, and there are three double crochets in each set. Threes are good for the rhythm of prayer/chant.
3. How laughter helps me to breathe
4. The angle of autumn sunlight
5. Solitude
May we walk in Beauty!
Mist, Moon, Mist
As November 6 approaches, and amid all the squeamishness I am feeling about the privileged way we do politics in this country, I am thinking about the “right” to vote.
June 4, 1919: The 19th Amendment finally offered women the right to vote in this country.
Except. Only White Women. Women put their bodies on the line for this right. They went to jail. They were beaten. They were brutally force-fed during hunger strikes. They were called terrible names, and experienced social shaming that destroyed their reputations. And they were white women, and they fought for white women. Some of my heras from that fight were notably silent on the subject of race. Others actively campaigned against women of color being included in the mix.
On this hand over here, I honor them for their selfless and courageous fight. They saw their moment and they took it, and the world was at least a marginally better place for it.
On this hand over here, though: Is it a victory, really, if it actively marginalizes such a large number of us?
My heras have feet of clay. Fatal flaws. Lack of real vision and insight and completely human compassion. Still, their work paved the way. But not for all of us. Did it at least open the door for all of us?
The Snyder Act, in 1924, finally gave the country’s original inhabitants the right to vote, five years after white women could vote. And looking at the kinds of voter suppression that took place for African American people after white people finally passed the 15th Amendment, it’s likely that many Native American women didn’t vote until much later.
While the 15th Amendment in 1870 ostensibly gave African American men the right to vote, we don’t have to look so far back into the mists of history to see how recently the Voting Rights Act was passed, to REALLY give black people the right to vote. It was on 1965, two years before I was born, and I’m not that old. So, while my grandmothers could have voted if they’d wanted to (it was against their religious principles, so they didn’t), my grandmothers’ African American sisters couldn’t vote until they were in their forties or fifties.
So this year I won’t be posting any images of the white suffragettes marching for women’s right to vote, as door-opening as that period was, as sacrificial as they were. And I am having trouble celebrating any movement to bring about ACTUAL Democratic voting in this country while the Supreme Court can take away the voting rights of First Nations people in North Dakota, while unscrupulous people are suppressing the black vote in Georgia, while elderly black voters are removed from a bus taking them to a polling place. There are more stories. Look them up.
I will honor the intent of the suffragettes who fought for the right to vote, for the doors they opened, and I will truly celebrate the life and work of the tireless Congressman John Lewis, who nearly died in the fight to bring about the Voting Rights Act.
There will always be undemocratic forces in this country that try to garner power for their own ends, to control the people. Voting, and fighting for the voice of all people to vote, is part of the bedrock of the democratic process. And I will speak out–and I beg you to speak out, too–for the rights of ALL Americans to vote for those who are chosen to speak for us in the halls of power.
Gratitude List:
1. Good fiction. I am listening to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. I don’t know why post-apocalyptic literature is so charmingly comforting in these difficult times. Perhaps it has to do with reminding me that things aren’t as bad as all that. Yet. Feel free to psychoanalyze me.
2. Speaking Truth to Power–all the people who do so
3. Cool fall days
4. The river, the river, the river
5. Magical, prayerful, contemplative acts
May we walk in Beauty!
Rhapsody Part 7 – Mary Oliver
If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves.
If you are in the sea I will slide into that
smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt.
But if you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation.
I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster.
And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with
some small and easy story.
Promises, promises, promises! The tongue jabbers, the heart
strives, fails, strives again. The world is perfect.
Love, however,
is an opera, a history, a long walk, that
includes falling and rising, falling and rising, while
the heart stays as sweet as a peach, as radiant and
grateful as the deep leaved hills.
*
“You either walk inside your story & own it or you stand outside your story & hustle for your worthiness.” ~BRENÉ BROWN
*
Duck, duck, goose.
Goose, goose, wren.
Mist, moon, mist.
October.
–Beth Weaver-Kreider
*
“Live the question now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some day into the answer.” –Rainer Maria Rilke
*
“and if i hear one more time
about a fool’s rights
to his tools of rage
I’m gonna take all my friends
and I’m gonna move to Canada
and we’re gonna die of old age” –Ani Difranco
Prayers and Rage
Okay, so I am getting more nervous about the coming winter by the moment here, as I watch the busy tribe of squirrels on the bank behind the house. They are eating and gathering at a furious pace. If they have inside information, we’re in for a tough one.
And this is one healthy, glowing gang of critters: Their fur is sleek, and their bodies are filled out and muscular. They look like they’ve been lifting little weights. One of them, gorging on berries six feet up in a bush, began to slip downward. She didn’t even pause in her eating, but grabbed a branch beside her, somersaulted downward, landed on her feet with the berry branch still in her mouth, and continued eating. Little parkour ninja folk. And I know that squirrels are already that way, but these are just. . .more so.
I don’t know if I have ever noticed just how russet-colored is the feathery fur on their breasts until a moment ago when one stood to greet an approaching comrade, and his breast shone chestnut-red in the morning sun. And that’s another thing. You know how squirrels stand to look around and greet each other, hands on hearts? I’ve always thought it made them look sort of timid and cute in a timorous “oh-my-heart” sort of way. These folks, whenever someone else approaches, stand like little warriors, feet apart, spines straight, eyes alert, hands on their chests in a greeting of solidarity.
These people are readying themselves for a hard winter ahead. May the walnuts and berries be plenty. May you grow ever healthier and sleeker, small ones, as you do the work to prepare your colony for what is to come.
Gratitude List:
1. Squirrels
2. There was a roseate spoonbill down on the Flats last week. They say it’s gone, but I think I’ll drive down there and just look around. I am grateful to know such a being was here.
3. Oak leaves
4. Clouds
5. All the people doing the good work. Let’s not let ourselves get too discouraged. So much wrongness has seeped out of the cracks recently, and for those of us who want to believe in the beauty and marvel and goodness of everyone, it has been particularly painful. A friend of mine reminded me this morning that often there are still noble elements that reside within the souls of those who are living openly by greed and power-mongering and death-dealing, and we need to find ways to hold conversations that enkindle those sparks of Goodness. I’ll keep searching for that nobility while remembering that there are so many out there who continue to work and live from the depths of their Divine Spark. Like you.
May we walk in Beauty!
Friday’s Doorway:
“Each moment from all sides rushes to us the call to love.” -―Rumi
*****
“The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves
into the rhythms of the human heart.
The earth is not outside us; it is within:
the clay from where the tree of the body grows.”
―John O’Donohue
*****
“There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one’s existence a minor work of art.”
―Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
*****
A Gift
by Denise Levertov
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.
*****
“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Just go ahead and live positively; go to the side and do it differently. Don’t waste time with oppositional energy.” ―Richard Rohr, writing about the thinking of Dom Helder Camara
*****
“The heart of faith is the call to love one another. . .” ―Avis Crowe
*****
“A child looking at ruins grows younger but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips in the sun.”
—W. S. Merwin, The Love of October
*****
“I’m not funny. What I am is brave.”
—Lucille Ball
*****
“My soul is sore when I learn how our people are tortured, when I learn how the rights of those created in the image of God are violated.” —Óscar Romero
Glorious Compensation
Gratitude List:
1. The glorious compensation for these darkly claustrophobic mornings is that we get to see the sunrise clouds on the way to school. I love sunrise clouds and sunrise skies.
2. Challenges. Our chapel speakers this week have been issuing challenges: See the sacred goodness in every person, turn off social media for two days, look for a situation in the world where dehumanization is happening and figure out how you can change that.
3. Fuzzy warm cats
4. A new good fantasy book to read: Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone
5. Raquel Vasquez Giilibrand’s chapbook Tales from the House of Vasquez. I read it yesterday, and found myself walking around chanting: madre, madrina, madrone. . . Mythic, legendary, ancestral: I love her poetry. It was like living in a dream while awake.
May we walk in Beauty!
John Philip Newell writes, “Knowing and naming brokenness is essential in the journey toward wholeness. To look life straight in the eye, to see its pain and to see its beauty—this is an essential part of glimpsing the way forward.”
*****
“Change is the essence of life; be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.”
—Reinhold Niebuhr
*****
“The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self—to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.” —Barbara Brown Taylor
*****
“As long as I live,
I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing.
I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood,
storm, and the avalanche.
I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens,
and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”
—John Muir
*****
“The world is our Mother. If we destroy her, where will we live?”
—Kogi Mama
*****
“It helps to think of our swamps of despair as the necessary muddle before clarity. Actually, swamps are incredibly fertile places full of life. In mythology the heroine must cross such a place in her darkest hour, where she comes to face her unlived life – meeting each of the divine allies disguised as regret, doubt, and insufficiency which swell up from the mud of her despondency. If she is willing to consummate the full encounter, they will reveal themselves in service to the vitality of her true being.” —Toko-pa Turner
Sacred Eating
Gratitudes:
1. Eating Verlen’s pepper. Great gratitude to the person who harvested them and brought them to church. It feels like such a sacred moment to share the food of a friend who has died. I could feel his smile.
2. Graceful lines of ink on paper
3. Stretching, strengthening
4. Origami. I found a pattern for a sweet little bat today, and my second try turned out a darling little critter. Now I need to find some pliable black paper.
5. Making knots in string. Crocheting again. All these bits of art and craft that make make life shiny.
May we walk in Beauty!
“Why are you so determined to keep your wild silently inside you? Let it breathe. Give it a voice. Let it roll out of you on the wide open waves. Set it free.”
―Jeanette LeBlanc
*****
“Lots of people talk to animals. . . . Not very many listen though. . .that’s the problem.” ―Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh
*****
“When war is our only industry, the only crop is blood.” ―Will Giles
*****
Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow.
Love
So God will think,
“Ahhhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and
Rolls.”
Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.
Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.
—Hafiz
*****
“My journey has taught me that I must learn religion as the mystics learned it, through the inward quest that Jungian psychology has helped me with so much. Banding together in institutions, whether religious, academic or professional, helps some feel secure and able to look down on the unenlightened. But I’ve clearly learned that the inward quest must become one’s own before it’s any good at all.”
—Bud Harris, Ph.D.
*****
“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: “When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?” —Gabrielle Roth
*****
“Blessed be your longing. Your endless ache. Your sharp crystal shatter. Your sea glass heart.” ―Jeannette LeBlanc
Mockingbird Chronicles 