Tag: poetry prompt

Yesterday’s News

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

I’m flying a little by the seat of my pants these days, trying to maintain all my daily rhythms, and still not get stressed by all the little things to keep up with. SO last night, I just didn’t do my daily April poem-a-day post here. Sometimes I beat myself up a bit for not being the energy powerhouse that so many of my friends seem to be. I need to protect my energy, gather and store.

Gratitude List:
1. The Dawn Chorus these days. Oh, the birdsong!
2. All the different smells
3. Friends and beloveds who invest time and heart in each other
4. How the beauty just explodes all of a sudden here in the spring. One minute you notice the leaves of the bleeding hearts appearing, and then SUDDENLY they’ve bloomed!
5. Movements for peace and justice. The people who are doing the work, whatever their piece of the work may be.
May we walk in Beauty!

“I love to write to you – it gives my heart a holiday and sets the bells to ringing.”
Emily Dickinson

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.” —Rumi

I called through your door,
“The mystics are gathering in the street. Come out!”
“Leave me alone. I’m sick.”
“I don’t care if you’re dead!
Jesus is here, and he wants to resurrect somebody!” —Rumi

“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ―Buddha
****”
Some words on my River, from Robert Louis Stevenson:
“I have been changed from what I was before;
and drunk too deep perchance the lotus of the air,
Beside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware.”
―Robert Louis Stevenson

“. . .and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ―Elie Wiesel

Rob Brezsny:
Plato said God was a geometer who created an ordered universe imbued with mathematical principles. Through the ages, scientists who’ve dared to speak of a Supreme Being have sounded the same theme. Galileo wrote, “To understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.”
Modern physicist Stephen Hawking says that by using mathematical theories to comprehend the nature of the cosmos, we’re trying to know “the mind of God.”
But philosopher Richard Tarnas proposes a different model. In his book “Cosmos and Psyche,” he suggests that God is an artist—more in the mold of Shakespeare than Einstein.
For myself―as I converse with God every day―I find Her equally at home as a mathematician and artist.

Owls

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Gratitude List:
1. Makin’ little ‘zines–so satisfying
2. Our History teacher is having her tenth-graders make a Hooverville as they study the Great Depression. They’ve actually made a little box town outside where they’ll be having class for the next few days. They have signs with the boxes, and they’ve written paragraphs about them, and now she’s given all the Middle Division teachers a note-sheet with reflection questions so we can take our classes out to experience it, basically turning it into a whole school lesson. So inspiring. Brilliant pedagogy.
3. Roasted cauliflower. Our school has a healthy living committee which challenged us to strive for five a day (veggies and fruits) in the month of March. We are definitely eating more fruits and veg in the WK household.
4. Track and field coaches–I’m grateful for all the time and heart they invest in our kid and his classmates
5. Yellow. I had a fascinating conversation with a friend a few weeks ago about tetrachromatism, the condition where the eyes have more rods or cones or something, causing them to actually see more colors than other people, and how people with tetrachromatism often don’t really like the color yellow. I think I probably don’t have it. Yellow makes me jubilant.
May we walk in Beauty!

“Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are “nothing but.” —C. G. Jung

Listen
by Shel Silverstein

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS,
the IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES,
Then listen close to me-
Anything can happen, child,
Anything can be.

If you are a dreamer
by Shel Silverstein

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

“It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”
—Mary Oliver

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” —Once-ler, in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” ―Nelson Mandela

Twelve Things I Have Learned So Far: (1) You do not always have to be right. (2) People can change. (3) Loss comes to us all, but so does grace. (4) We can disagree and still be together. (5) Kindness is the greatest treasure I have to give away. (6) We are all healed even if it does not happen on our timeline. (7) Imagination is a form of prayer. (8) I own nothing. (9) Life is full of sacred signs if only we look to see them. (10) The ancestors are real. (11) Not all of my friends and mentors are human. (12) Now is eternal and it is my home. —Steven Charleston

Moonshadow

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Gratitude List:
1. Cosmic Events
2. The community of people all enjoying the same thing
3. Mac ‘n’ Cheese
4. Sheri S. Tepper’s world-building
5. We went owl-watching today!
May we walk in Beauty!

“You have to really hug the [one] you are holding. You have to make him or her very real in your arms.. breathing consciously and hugging with all your body, spirit, and heart. Hugging meditation is a practice of mindfulness. “Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms, alive. Breathing out, he or she is so precious to me.” If you breathe deeply like that, holding the person you love, the energy of your care and appreciation will penetrate into [them] and they will be nourished and bloom like a flower.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

“For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.“ —William Blake

We, unaccustomed to courage, exiled from delight, live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.“ —Maya Angelou

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” —Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Where there’s life there’s hope, and need of vittles.” ―JRR Tolkien

“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” ―June Jordan

“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ―Albert Einstein

“We are all the leaves of one tree.
We are all the waves of one sea.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh

“It is respectable to have no illusions―and safe―and profitable and dull.” ―Joseph Conrad

“I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether they are worthy.” —Thomas Merton

Rilke:
God speaks to each of us as [s]he 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.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

“What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage. And is our life not a mystery school, a seat of earthy instruction?” —Martin Shaw

The Fib

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Day 6: Write a fib.
There are two ways to write a fib poem. One is to write a lie, tell a tall tale, let loose a whopper of a fiction. Startlingly, the truth can sometimes be found in the margins of a lie.

Or, write in the form of a fib–Fibonacci, that is. In the Fibonacci Sequence, each number in the pattern is derived from the addition of the previous two numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. So in a Fib poem, the first line is a single syllable, as is the second. The third line has two syllables, the fourth has three, and so on. I usually don’t go higher than 13, and sometimes I write a second stanza and come back down to one again.

Gratitude List:
1. Chris’s Dogboys, Solly and Gabe. Gabe is such a smoochy pooch. Snuggly.
2. Storytelling and songs
3. Anticipating eclipse
4. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: BLUUUUUUUE sky! (Oy, was that ever a long stretch of grey rainy days.)
5. Quinoa salad with veggies, tahini, roasted rosemary grapes
May we walk in Beauty!

“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. (Hope) is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.” —Rebecca Solnit

“I am not giving up on peace, even if, right now, it is taking some heavy blows. I still believe justice will not desert the innocent. And I will always believe that truth will find its way to the light. These bedrock visions guide me into the future. They hold me up when the going gets rough. Conflict may have the upper hand now, but never count love out. The Spirit has a few surprises to offer in the days to come. Signs of hope will find us wherever we may be. I am not giving up.” —Steven Charleston

“Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.” —Maya Angelou

“God invites everyone to the House of Peace.” —The Holy Quran

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell

“What a pity that so hard on the heels of Christ came the Christians.”
—Annie Dillard

“The arc of history is long, and what we’re here to do is make a mark. . . . You do the work because you’re slowly moving the needle. There are times in history when we feel like we’re going backward, but that’s part of the growth.” —Barack Obama

“Each moment from all sides rushes to us the call to love.” —Rumi

“You are a co-creator of love in this world.” —Richard Rohr

“Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing out a space where new stories can root; in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.”
—Jeanette Winterson

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.” —Eden Ahbez

“Remember, the ugly, old woman/witch
is the invention of dominant cultures.
The beauty of crones is legendary:
old women are satin-skinned,
softly wrinkled, silver-haired, and awe-inspiring
in their truth and dignity.” —Susun Weed

Librarians

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

My Saturday has gotten away with me, and my head is not in a poetry place. Sigh. I wish I had done better for the librarians. They deserve more. Every time I started getting into it, I veered into rage at all the ways in which school boards and local commissioners and sanctimonious, self-righteous outrage hounds are attacking libraries and librarians these days. In my local community just a week ago, our public library received a bomb threat, and the library director received a bomb threat at her house.

Support your local library. Stand up and speak out when the hordes attack. Trust librarians.

Keepers of democracy, they stand
on the front lines of free speech,
offering equal access to all who
seek wisdom in the written word.
Do you need a recipe for risotto
or revolution? A book on planets
or inclined planes or things to do
on a rainy day? The librarian will
tell you where to find it, and you
just might find your sense of purpose
in the stacks, in those cathedral
corridors of shelves. You might
discover yourself in a book you
had never thought to open.

Gratitude List:
1. The River, and the sun on the River
2. The sycamores along the River
3. Librarians (Happy National Librarian Day!)
4. Rosemary roasted grapes
5. Those red, red tulips!
May we walk in Beauty!

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” —Terry Pratchett

The Happy Virus
by Hafez
I caught the happy virus last night
When I was out singing beneath the stars.
It is remarkably contagious—
So kiss me.

“It is our mind, and that alone,
that chains us or sets us free.” —Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell

“We must live from the center.” —Bahauddin, father of Rumi

“Some days I am more wolf than woman and I am still learning how to stop apologising for my wild.” —Nikita Gill

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” —Albert Einstein

“Writer’s block results from
too much head. Cut off your head.
Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa
when her head was cut off.
You have to be reckless when writing.
Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”
—Joseph Campbell

“Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.” —Annie Lennox

“Anyone out there want to sing with me while we finish this march? I realize it may seem a little counter-intuitive right now, with so many in a somber mood, but the harder the walk gets, the more I think we need to meet its challenge with strong hearts and voices. The singing becomes our anthem, a rebuke to the powers of pain and an exaltation of the indomitable human spirit. If we must move forward against all odds, then let us do so singing. Let them hear us coming. Let them know we have only just started to hit our stride.” —Steven Charleston

Guardian

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Gratitude List:
1. All the fine, thoughtful souls at the Poetry Reading and Workshop at Radiance tonight
2. French Fries
3. Cherry trees and peach trees
4. I saw blue sky today, just a patch behind the clouds, but it was there!
5. The Guardians
May we walk in Beauty!

“We write to taste life twice.” —Anais Nin

“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” —Maya Angelou

“If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

“When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and seeds of hope.” —Wangari Maathai

Ask Some Questions

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Here is my Questions Poem:

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

Rain, rain, rain

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Here is my Rain Poem. I feel like I am starting to get back in the groove.

Gratitude List:
1. Rain, and the hope of sun to come
2. More light each day
3. Roasted veggies
4. Naps with cats
5. People who step and do what needs to be done
May we walk in Beauty!

“Sound or vibration is the most powerful force in the universe. Music is a divine art, to be used not only for pleasure but as a path to Awakening.” —Yogananda

“Being a successful poet is a lot like being a successful mushroom.” —Poet Richard Howard

“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” —Hermes Trismegistus

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” —Jane Goodall

“Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.” —Henri Nouwen

“In the end, we’ll all become stories.” —Margaret Atwood

“Privilege is when you think something’s not a problem because it’s not a problem to you personally.” —attributed to many authors

Dea Ex Machina
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

What we speak
we create.
Writing,
we make meaning
into existence.

These words, cogs
and gears, shift
meaning to matter:

“Let there be. . .”
And there is.

And it is good.

quilting
by Lucille Clifton

some other where
alchemists mumble over pots.
their chemistry stirs
into science. their science
freezes into stone.

in the unknown world
the woman
threading together her need
and her needle
nods toward the smiling girl…

Make space in this house
for all of the people you are.
Make room for the schemer,
the doubter, the cynic,
but open some space
for the credulous child
and the mystic, the dreamer,
the wild one, the quiet one.

Open a space within
for the glass-half-full to dance
with the glass-half-empty,
for the monk to sing songs
of revolution with the fury.

There in those rooms,
the One may enter
and speak your many names,
saying, Peace be yours.
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

Olly Olly Oxen Free!

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Today’s prompt is to write a “(Blank) Free” Poem.

ollyollyoxenfree!
who are olly’s oxen?
why are they boxed-in
and searching for freedom?
like children running
from hide and seek
or kick-the-can
uncaught uncaptured
last to be found
racing to safe haven
sun setting over the hill
oxen giggles echoing
wiggling into base
safe

I’m trying to drag myself through November and into December right now. I always feel a little guilty about these winter blues, as though I’m not trying hard enough to be energetic, not pushing myself through the blues. I would never tell a depressed person to suck it up and just try harder, so why do I tell myself to do that during November’s blahs and December’s doldrums?

I read a lovely thing today about how trees in our climate need their time of winter rest in order to survive. They actually need to winter. So. Me too. I’m going to let myself winter. Just sit on the couch and read or knit after dark (which feels like all the time when I am home these days). I ran a little this evening, but only a half mile or so. I’ll keep trying to get necessary exercise when I can, because I know that is supposed to help, but I am also going to get more sleep.

Gratitude List:
1. Cloud Dragons
2. I feel like all my classes are really into the class novels right now. I love sharing story with students. (We’re reading Touching Spirit Bear, Catch-22, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
3. Spaghetti Squash
4. Remembering to let myself Winter/hibernate/settle
5. You
May we walk in Beauty!

“Healing comes in waves and maybe today the wave hits the rocks. And that’s ok, that’s ok, darling. You are still healing, you are still healing.” —Ijeoma Umebinyuo

“No matter where we are, the ground between us will always be sacred ground.“ —Fr. Henri Nouwen

“The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.” —Gretel Ehrlich

“‪The fact that these words and the jumble of lines that create their letters has no real, inherent meaning outside of a human context, yet they hum with life, is a wonderful reminder that what we imagine can easily become real and powerful simply because we decide it should be so.‬” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist

“Writing at the library. Surrounded by thousands of books, windows into other minds. Some of these writers are living. Some are not. Neatly ordered rectangles of concentrated human life and intellect. A book is certainly a kind of ghost and libraries are pleasantly haunted places.” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist

“The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.” —Virginia Woolf

I know nothing, except what everyone knows —
If there when Grace dances, I should dance.
—W.H. Auden

“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic—the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.”
—Charles de Lint

“The innocence of our childhood lives on, in each one of us, no matter how old or battered we may be. Still that original goodness, that simple goodness, remains within us. Our best nature never grows old. What the Spirit first intended us to be is still there, peeping out from wrinkled eyes, caught in a quick glance in the mirror: the laughing, shining, curious child who lives again. And again and again. For we are made of the intention of heaven, a part of the perfect life at the center of all creation. Watch for your inner self, the ageless soul, and see it smiling back at you, like a little child caught beside the cookie jar.” —Steven Charleston

Language Without Pronouns

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Okay, so today’s prompt was a fun head game: Write a poem without using any pronouns. Now, it would have been fun just to write a lovely imagistic poem, but it seemed like a better challenge to try to write with sentences that would require pronouns, but to work around them. So then, I just went riffing along, feeling for all the world like Gertrude Stein.

no word refers to any word but the object
referred to, in the language of lost pronouns

a bird is a bird is a bird
the bird flies to the bird’s own nest
where the bird lays an egg
and an egg is an egg
and in the egg is a bird
and that bird will hatch out
of that bird’s cozy egg on little legs
and some day will spread new bird’s wings
and fly, to build another nest like the nest
the new bird was born in

the road to an idea travels again and again
and again over the road of the word
repeating the bird
replicating the name
coming back to the same wordnest
from which the word was fledged

Gratitude List:
1. Cloud-dragons setting fire to the setting sun
2. Quinoa
3. This funny, funny young person
4. Getting some exercise
5. Sitting with a group of colleagues this afternoon and sharing the successes of our students
May we walk in Beauty!

“Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
—Walt Whitman

“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful—an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” —Ansel Adams

“A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation-robes.” —Alexander Pope

“We must finally stop appealing to theology to justify our reserved silence about what the state is doing—for that is nothing but fear. ‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’—for who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear. . . . Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“It is so easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build.” —Nelson Mandela

“We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation.” —Thomas Berry