Gratitude List:
1. Back to the rhythm, with lots of extra prep time under my belt.
2. The words of Rumi. Today: “Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.”
3. The helpers
4. That wren out there, welcoming in the morning
5. Onions and mushrooms sauteéd in butter
May we walk in Beauty! Beauty all around.
Another day to wait until the prompt comes. Here is a photo that one of my boys took last summer.
Gratitude List:
1. The hymn sing at Freiman Stoltzfus’s Gallery last night. We sat on wooden benches like in a Mennonite meetinghouse. The music was palpable; I think I could taste it, smell it, see the colors of it washing against the walls catching the rich brilliance of Freiman’s paintings. It is still clinging to me this morning. All those voices, harmonies. Strangers and friends giving our voices to each other. I don’t know how to explain why this is so, but it seemed like a healing act, like sound therapy for a hurting world, pushing back the vicious shadow.
2. All the humming that happens in my house. Yesterday, Jon was changing laundry in the basement, and I could hear him humming through the floorboards. At the same time, a boy was humming to himself while he read back issues of This Old House. The other boy was making a fanciful helicopter of Legos, and humming a third thing to himself.
3. The twin red maples near that one industrial plant on Route 30. Every day I pass them twice. All the other trees have either dropped their leaves completely, or left the season of brilliance behind. Not these folks. Their shades of scarlet and orange pulse and shimmer, especially in these grey days. The dryads seem to have something to tell us.
4. Yesterday I read about a woman–an American–who gathered baby carriers and took them to Macedonia, where she waits for the ferry from Lesbos and fits them on families with babies and toddlers. She spoke of the relief in the eyes of parents who now had free hands to care for their older children, of the father who could not stop kissing the tiny head now tucked safely beneath his chin. Bless the helpers.
5. The peacemakers are rising.
Join hands. Rise up. Walk in Love.
Re-posting a poem I wrote on a dark day back in December.
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers–so many caring people in this world.” — Mister Rogers
Look for the helpers.
I cast a line from me to you.
You cast it outward to those you love.
Fill that web, that basket, that nest, that bowl
with our open wounded hearts,
our prayers, our stones,
our candles, our feathers,
the fine white hair of our grandmothers.
Something to hold the children,
the mothers, the fathers,
a bowl that will witness and hold the grief.
We will be the helpers.
Gratitude List:
1. Breathing in. Breathing out.
2. The way people help. Almost blindly. Just running into the fray. Goodness that goes beyond sense of personal preservation.
3. The wonderful people who help us on Goldfinch Farm. We have such a great crew.
4. Great customers, new and old. I feel so heartened.
5. Mowing the grass. I love to get out on that old riding mower and mow the grass.
May we walk in beauty.
Mockingbird in Maple this afternoon.
Mockingbird Chronicles 