Gratitude List: 1. Did you see the sun today? I did! 2. The tang of Horseradish 3. Weaving it all together, integrating the pieces 4. My daily morning Philosophers’ Club, otherwise known as Middle Division Reading and Writing 5. The smell of sandalwood May we walk in Beauty!
“We cannot be grateful for what we do not notice, and we cannot honor what we fail to see.” —Marcy C. Earle
“I must have flowers, always and always.” —Claude Monet
“Nobody’s on the road Nobody’s on the beach There’s something in the air The summer’s out of reach…” —Don Henley
‘Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.” —Roger Ebert
In a mist of light falling with the rain I walk this ground of which dead men and women I have loved are part, as they are part of me. In earth, in blood, in mind, the dead and living into each other pass, as the living pass in and out of loves as stepping to a song. The way I go is marriage to this place, grace beyond chance, love’s braided dance covering the world. —Wendell Berry (The Wheel)
”You have to begin to tell the story of your life as you now want it to be, and discontinue the tales of how it has been or of how it is.” —Esther Hicks
Write a Love or Anti-Love Poem, the man says, and so I show up, once again, on the doorstep of the Muse. About halfway through the month, and I’m feeling sleepy and grouchy, and I think I’ve been here before. And I just can’t get up the nerve to ring the doorbell and see what the Muse might have to offer me. Sigh.
it’s always the front door of the muse that gets me, standing on the porch, anticipating the meeting, that old dog anxiety nipping at my heels, and I linger. shall i knock, or shall i ring?
i rehearse my lines, but each one sounds like it was written by a child, or like i’m rehashing something i wrote last year when she seemed to like me, and she had something new for me every day.
here, i’ll tell her, is another prompt! we don’t have to start from scratch! ugh, but no, she’ll scoff at me, i just know it. another LOVE poem? good grief, no wonder you dither on my doorstep.
i’m not dithering on the— okay, maybe just a little, but what if she sends me away with nothing? what if that poem i wrote last june the last good thing i’ll ever write? what if she has nothing more to give?
Gratitude List: 1. Origami 2. A clean kitchen 3. Sweatshirts (I don’t think I bought a single sweatshirt in my 30s and 40s, but last year I bought a sweatshirt from my school, and now I have three, and I love them) 4. Next week is a holiday week, and the college kid comes home 5. Autumn gingkos May we walk in Beauty! Beauty all around.
“We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can only happen if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.” —Macrina Wiederkehr
“It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.” —P.G. Wodehouse
“You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.” —Frida Kahlo
“I touch God in my song as the hill touches the far-away sea with its waterfall. The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” —Rabindranath Tagore
Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?
“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds beacons, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of of soul in shadowy times like these—to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.”
“Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.” —Brooke Hampton
“Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar— I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.” —Meister Eckhart
Yes
It could happen any time, tornado, earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could you know. That’s why we wake and look out–no guarantees in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning, like right now, like noon, like evening. —William Stafford
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien
Today is the last day of National Poetry Month. It has been another marvelous month. I have felt like the Muse was active more days this month than not, for which I am grateful. I never know when I begin these things whether I am going to hit a wall by day ten and have to slog through to the end. I’m grateful that there was so much to find and follow this month.
I have four more weeks of school, and then I’ll hopefully have time to do some editing. I really want to commit to going through my work and pulling together another book. But I have said that several times in the past few years, so I need to find the Key in order to make it happen.
The rosary prayers go in a cycle of three sets: The Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. There is a fourth set that was added by Pope John Paul II, but I haven’t studied those. As I have been praying the rosary since August, I have been meditating on the mysteries as a Path of Initiation to Enlightenment. I believe we are repeating this cycle over and over again in our lives, and the three-day cycle of repetition in the rosary cycle offers a way to meditate on one’s current cycle of transformation.
The Joyful Mysteries are about hearing and accepting the call to transformation: 1. The Annunciation: Hearing the call, meeting the beloved angel being, saying Yes, consenting to the process 2. The Visit with Elizabeth: Mentoring, wise confidante, comfort and counsel 3. The Birth: Stepping onto the path, hatching, the seed bursts forth, the initiation 4. The Elder Blessing: Blessing and commissioning by the priest/priestess, they say: “I have waited my whole life for this!” 5. The Finding in the Temple: Finding the purpose, defining the vision of the initiation story
The Sorrowful Mysteries are about meeting the challenges of the enlightenment journey: 1. The Agony in the Garden: Facing betrayal and abandonment, anxiety about what is to come 2. The Flogging in the Temple: Pain, the reality of betrayal, enduring the torture 3. The Crown of Thorns: Being shamed and mocked, standing shameless in the face of taunting 4. The Bearing of the Cross: Picking up the work that must happen even in the midst of trauma and anguish 5. Death: Death, loss, symbolic death, end of old life and way of being
The Glorious Mysteries are about stepping into the truth of the new way: 1. Resurrection: Symbolic rebirth, restoration, revivifying, re-energizing, re-awakening 2. Ascension into Heaven: Stepping back onto the path with Enlightenment in sight 3. The Descent of the Holy Spirit: Tongues of fire, new language, deep connection to Spirit, recollection of “This is my Beloved Child in whom I am well pleased.” 4. The Assumption of the Virgin: Taking up the priestessing role, putting on the mantle 5. The Coronation of the Virgin: The Summoning to the coronation of the Queen, living in the glory of the Mystery
This past summer, when I felt caught in cycles of unrelenting Sorrowful Mysteries, it was a comfort to meditate every three days on the process of meeting the challenges and then to remind myself that the Glorious Mysteries follow. And of course, while this is a linear telling, there’s also a layering quality, a sense in which we live all the stages at once.
Gratitude List: 1. Denise Levertov’s poetry 2. Writing practice. I long to have a writer’s life, but in the meantime, I can carve out time for a consistent writing practice 3. Circles of beloved community 4. The quiet misty green of the grove in the morning 5. Always new things to learn May we walk in Beauty!
“Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are world of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” —Richard Rohr
“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” —Georgia O’Keeffe
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit
“The child’s hand Folding these wings Wins no wars and ends them all. “ ―Thomas Merton
“I never sanction violence. Never. But I wonder how we got to the point when destruction of property deserves greater coverage and a greater portion of our attention than the destruction of human life. Since when do shattered windows matter more than shattered spines, shattered voice boxes, and shattered dreams? When did we become a people who mourn the destruction of things over the destruction of lives?” —Omid Safi
Seeking to rewild my spirit, to return to raw instinct, to strengthen my senses, to adventure in those wild inner spaces. . .
Gratitude List:
Jon found my rosary! It’s been missing for more than a week. It will feel good to feel its heft again during my prayers in the morning.
Such a funny moment on the way home today. Driving along Picking Road, we had to stop while a flock of about ten pure black chickens moseyed across the road. And I know why the chickens crossed the road! I have the answer! They were following the turkey! The turkey was right there waiting for them on the other side, and they followed him across!
Chilly spring rains
The greens, the pinks, the yellows, the blue, the blue the blue!
Rosemary bread May we walk in Beauty!
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” —Simone Weil
“You can never leave footprints that last if you are always walking on tiptoe.” —Leymah Gbowee
“God speaks to each of us as [she] makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“I do not see a delegation of the four-footed. I see no seat for the eagles.” —Chief Oren Lyons, Onondaga
“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.” —Kurt Vonnegut
“I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.” ―Rachel Held Evans
Go deeper. Past thoughts into silence. Past silence into stillness. Past stillness into the heart. Let love consume all that is left of you. —Kabir
My sister-in-law is a wise woman. She gave this gentle advice last week for how to respond to anxiety. Look to your left and describe what you see there. Look to your right and do the same. Look in front of you and describe that. Then, look behind you, where the shadows and the unknowns are, and describe that–the physical space here and now. It makes the other unknowns, the ones that freeze and weigh on me, seem less unknown, less likely to pounce.
Every morning before I begin my round of prayers, I cast a circle. I speak of beauty at all the directions, then beauty above me and beauty below me, beauty within and beauty without, and now, I very consciously look to the beauty to the left and the right of me, to the beauty before me, and finally, with gratitude, to the beauty behind me, taking care to notice the safe beauty of my physical surroundings. Then I call upon the Earth which is Her body, the Air which is Her breath, the Fire of Her bright spirit, and the Waters of Her living womb.
Last year at this time, I felt so vulnerable, so unprotected, so endangered, even while I felt such a surge of love and support from my students and their families, from my own family and friends and church community. Now, I create protected space in that circle every morning. One of my prayers is: “Draw me into the dance, into the circle of your radiant loving arms, and protect and preserve me from those who would wish or seek or will or do me harm.” I am befriending the shadows of my anxiety, and also making boundaries to protect myself.
One of my favorite viral internet photos is of a grinning caiman with butterflies all over its head. I read that the reason the butterflies hang out on the caiman is to drink their salty tears. This morning I read of the discovery of the habits of the Gorgone macarea moth of Brazil, which sips the tears of sleeping birds at night.
Today’s prompt (Robert Lee Brewer at Writers Digest) is to write a shadow poem. Today I went a little more concrete in the sculpture of the poem. It’s not quite a moth, but not quite not.
Gratitude List: 1. The sounds of sheep and goats baaing in the field across the holler 2. Thermal delight and the breezes of springtime 3. What the shadows have to teach me 4. Good physical work and still energy to keep going in the day 5. The grass is full of violets and the holler is filled with the singing of birds May we walk ever in Beauty!
“Let me tell you what I do know though… I know mountains grow because of their fault lines. I know lakes turn that gorgeous shade of turquoise because of their silt. I know jewels are formed under pressure. I know trees can grow through rocks, and rivers can break canyons.
I know there are 120 crayola crayons to choose from, so you can color yourself any which way you like.
I know the earth smells fabulous after a hard rain, and I know she breathes. I know out of the destruction of forest fires, new and stronger ecosystems can emerge. I know there is life in the deepest depths of the ocean and her tides can soften stone.
I know there can be no shadows without light. I know the passion is in the risk.
I know time heals, and most things will be okay eventually. I know you are made of the star stuff, and I know out there somebody loves you; exactly the way you are, even if you haven’t found them yet.
I know all these things, and tell them to you — in case you forgot to remember.” —Jacquelyn Taylor
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” —James Baldwin
“We have tried to create a watertight social system so that mercy is not needed, nor even attractive. Mercy admits and accepts that not all problems can be solved by our techniques, formulas, and technology. The ‘superfluous’ opening of the human heart that we call mercy is essential for any structure or institution to remain human and humanizing.” —Richard Rohr
“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” —Anne Lamott
“Your heart and my heart are very, very old friends.” —Hafiz
“Now I see the secret of making the best persons, it is to grow in the open air and eat and sleep with the earth.” —Walt Whitman
“Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.” —John Muir
“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” —Roald Dahl
“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as she is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things she would not have thought of if she had not started to say them.” —William Stafford (but I have changed the pronouns to feminine)
“America stands for exactly what Americans will stand for. History doesn’t write itself. It must be lived and practiced.” —Jesse Williams
If forgiveness were an act of will she’d have managed it by now. It’s not a thing you can declare and–poof!–the grace appears and ushers everyone into the next level of Enlightenment.
She stopped praying for her enemies, stopped trying on the oversized robe of forgiveness, not of her own designing.
Now she calls upon their angels just to join her in her prayers, to enter her circle and listen while she says, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” And, “Deliver us ever from evil.”
The ones who cause us harm, through malice or through fear, bind themselves to us, entangling our destinies as inextricably as love could ever do, and forgiveness becomes not a single act, but a long slow dance, improvised at every moment, a careful disentangling.
Gratitude List: 1. Sparkling morning sun 2. Doing things in my own time 3. Portals and doorways 4. The process of becoming 5. Warm boots May we walk in Beauty!
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” -Oscar Wilde
“Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute. Where do you seek the spiritual? You seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do every day. Sweeping the floor, watering the vegetables, and washing the dishes become holy and sacred if mindfulness is there. With mindfulness and concentration, everything becomes spiritual.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh
“…when women speak truly they speak subversively–they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want–to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you–I want to hear you.” —Ursula Le Guin
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” —Muriel Rukeyser
“Oh to meet, however briefly, the greatness that lives under our surface. To summon enough bravery to be without armour and strategy, for the chance at meeting that irreducible power. Oh to make of our terrified hearts a prayer of surrender to the God of Love; that we remain safe in our quivering ache to be near that Otherness, even for a moment. To touch that ancient life who will never relinquish its wilderness, who lets instinct make its choices, whose knowing lives in bones and whose song is a wayfinder.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.” ―Parker J. Palmer
“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” ―Emily Dickinson
“One of my favourite teachings by Martín Prechtel is that ‘violence is an inability with grief.’ In other words, it takes skillfulness to grieve well, to grieve wholeheartedly. It requires us to bravely, nakedly come to face all that is lost, keeping our hearts open to loving just as fully again. “When we make war, lashing out in rage and revenge, it is because we are unwilling to make this full encounter with grief. It is easy to enact the same violence which has taken so much from us―including towards ourselves―but the greater work is to let that which is missing enlarge your life; to make beauty from your brokenness. “Whatever you hold in the cauldron of your intention is your offering to the divine. The quality of assistance you can generate and receive from the Holy is governed by the quality of your inner offering. When you indulge in fear and doubt, you are flooding the arena where love is attempting to work.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“Our true home is in the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.” ―Hafiz (Ladinsky)
“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.” ―Oscar Levant
Today’s prompt is to write an ekphrastic poem, to take a piece of art, and to write a poem about it. All month, I have been writing a poem, and then creating a piece of AI art to go with it. As I began to create a piece of AI art to use for this prompt, the poem approached. Before I managed to create a piece of art, the poem had found its way to my notes, and so I created the art to go with the poem that went with a piece of artwork that I had imagined. And so it goes: Which comes first?
Which came first: the image or the word, the sound or the sense, the egg or the bird?
Did it happen with BANG or “Begin,” with the seed or the dream, with poem or picture, with to say, or to seem?
A project, a poem, a world comes to be in the nodes where the lines of word and image cross, the woven fibers of vision and voice interlocking, and in the silence and darkness between, meaning–like water– trickles into the spaces, into the interstices, of the living, breathing tapestry.
Becoming becomes, word takes shape and image speaks, and something new comes into being.
Gratitude List: 1. Every day right now: November Roses! 2. People telling their stories 3. The buck who whuffed at me in the grove 4. Cardinal singing in the cherry tree 5. Words and images May we walk in Beauty!
“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.” ― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.” ―Gandalf
Let the rain come and wash away the ancient grudges, the bitter hatreds held and nurtured over generations. Let the rain wash away the memory of the hurt, the neglect. Then let the sun come out and fill the sky with rainbows. Let the warmth of the sun heal us wherever we are broken. Let it burn away the fog so that we can see each other clearly. So that we can see beyond labels, beyond accents, gender or skin color. Let the warmth and brightness of the sun melt our selfishness. So that we can share the joys and feel the sorrows of our neighbors. And let the light of the sun be so strong that we will see all people as our neighbors. Let the earth, nourished by rain, bring forth flowers to surround us with beauty. And let the mountains teach our hearts to reach upward to heaven.
Amen. ―Rabbi Harold Kushner
I place in the hands of Time these stones: the story of this day, the people I have been near to, the songs the Fates have whispered in my ears, the colors that haunt me.
See how they turn to mist, how they glow for a moment– red, then golden, then blue– then dissipate like ash blown by a wind before I can register that they have lost their substance.
Where does memory go when it flows out with the tide, when it slips down the drain, when it is blown out with the morning fog?
I am still the child in the forest, walking blind through the swirling mists, under the shadows of the great trees. With each forward step on the trail, a little bird flutters from the pathway behind, a bread crumb in its beak. ―Beth Weaver-Kreider
“When I stopped trying to change you, you changed me.” ―Rachel Macy Stafford
Brewer’s prompt today was to write a poem about the future. I was contemplating the timelessness of praying in the the cherry grove, and on friendships that have lasted and grown over thirty-five years. As I rode my bike this early afternoon along the Susquehanna, I write this poem, stopping every once in a while to write down what had been happening in my head.
Finding Time for Nancy
Stand in the center of this sacred grove and feel how past and future converge upon the miracle of this moment, how your ancient loves and longings are stitched with gold and scarlet thread into the tapestry of the holy Now. Leave the tattered threads of future fears behind you and wade into the waters of this present, this presence.
You are the soul you have always been, the soul you all ways have been. And, you are new now.
And now.
And now.
And now
Gratitude List: 1. A marvelous bike 2. Trees that seem to reach out for human companionship 3. Beloved friends in it for the long haul 4. Strings of prayer flags 5. People who help me to be my best self May we walk in Beauty!
“Through a process of perpetual discernment and “prayer unceasing” we may dive into the well of each faith and emerge with the treasure that connects us all.” —Mirabai Starr
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” —Carl Sagan
“If the Rhine, the Yellow, the Mississippi rivers are changed to poison, so too are the rivers in the trees, in the birds, and in the humans changed to poison, almost simultaneously. There is only one river on the planet Earth and it has multiple tributaries, many of which flow through the veins of sentient creatures.” —Thomas Berry
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” —Kurt Vonnegut
“For a Star to be born, there is one thing that must happen; a nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your Destruction. This is your birth.” —attributed to Noor Tagouri
”So much of bird flight is really expert falling, slipping into that delicate space within the argument between gravity and air resistance. That natural alchemy transforms a plummet into a glide. Someday, I hope to learn to fail like birds fall.” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist
“Reading and writing cannot be separated. Reading is breathing in; writing is breathing out.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
Today’s prompt from Robert Lee Brewer is to write a scary poem. I’ve been meditating on angels and guardian spirits in recent weeks, and this morning’s rosary prayer walked through the Joyful Mysteries, beginning with the Annunciation, so Mary, and then Shepherds, and then Saul, came to mind.
Do not be afraid
says the angel, and proceeds to blow your world apart.
You know that when the angel appears, no matter how joyful the tidings, your life will never be the same. You’ll face the scorn of the village for daring to accept the angel’s calling. You’ll risk losing your sheep as you run off into the night to seek a baby in a barn. You’ll fall from your warhorse, blinded, into the filth of the common streets.
If you take up the story the angel hands you, you will bear the weight of the world within your own body, you will gather lost and wandering souls instead of the sheep you left in your fields, you will need to abandon your self-righteous quest and risk your own life in the service of Love.
Do not be afraid, the angel says. Step into the doorway of the labyrinth. Journey into the darkness. Walk through the valley of the shadow. Gather at the Gates of Life and Death. Be a presence in the enfolding dark for lost and frightened souls to draw near. Weave your songs and prayers and magic spells into a shining cloth of hope and transformation.
Gratitude List: 1. Angelic messengers 2. The journey 3. Owl feather 4. Rain 5. Ice Cream May we walk in Beauty!
“It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.” —Leonard Cohen
Denise Levertov: Don’t say, don’t say there is no water to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen The fountain springing out of the rock wall and you drinking there. And I too before your eyes found footholds and climbed to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes, frowned as she watched–but not because she grudged the water, only because she was waiting to see we drank our fill and were refreshed.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water. The fountain is there among its scalloped grey and green stones, it is still there and always there with its quiet song and strange power to spring in us, up and out through the rock.
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen
“Remember that day in the woods when everything was so dark, so dreary and you were so terrifyingly alone?
How can it be that these are the same woods and you the same soul and everything shines so, and everything is filled with life?” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Acquiring problems is a fundamental human need. It’s as crucial to your well-being as getting food, air, water, sleep, and love. You define yourself–indeed, you make yourself–through the riddles you attract and solve. The most creative people on the planet are those who frame the biggest, hardest questions and then gather the resources necessary to find the answers.” —Rob Brezsny
Mockingbird Chronicles 