step it out, catch a breath make a space, take a rest let it go, let it come carry on, get it done
take a break, break a pattern blast the rules, what’s the matter? tune it out, turn it off, jump down, land soft
watch the sky, pray for rain quiet your heart, quiet your brain relax your shoulders, stretch your back take time off, get back on track
“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 ***** “A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen. They have to come ‘round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.” —Granger, in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury ***** “When I stopped trying to change you, you changed me.” ―Rachel Macy Stafford ***** “When will the change begin? When will it start to happen? We have waited so long and prayed so long, when will the light begin to shine in this conflicted world? Our answer is: when we each begin to see it in ourselves. When we believe and not despair, when we love and not fear, when we give and not take – then we will see the change start to happen, and happen all around us. The answer is already here, within, waiting for us to find it.” —Steven Charleston ***** “When Teresa of Avila was asked what she did in prayer, she replied, ‘I just allow myself to be loved.'” —Anthony de Mello ***** “I never lose. I either win or I learn.” —Nelson Mandela ***** “If you have never been called an incorrigible, defiant, impossible woman… have faith. There is yet time.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Today in my high school ELA class, we did a lesson on the nocturne, using Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night,” Yasmine Hamdan’s Tiny Desk Concert for NPR, and Ameen Rihani’s poem “Reflections.” The students then asked me to play Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” The contemplative mood of painting and music, and in the poetry in both Rihani’s poem and the Green Day song. Today’s prompt from Write Better Poetry is to write a poem about taste.
The Taste of Darkness, Silent and Alone by Beth Weaver-Kreider, Mockingbird Chronicles
In the night, you can taste the flavor of darkness, savor loneliness.
In the city streets at night, music drifts faintly through the quiet dark.
In the countryside, the train whistle can be heard from ten miles away.
Loneliness is not always lonely. Silence is often filled with sound.
Gratitude List:
1. A kind police officer who knew who to call to take the baby raccoons that fell in the creek when the tree came down.
2. It looks like the electricity folks are going to try to get the power on tonight
3. Crank-powered flashlight that charges a phone
4. Such wonderful colleagues
5. Country silence
May we walk in Beauty!
“It is possible to become discouraged about the injustice we see everywhere. But God did not promise us that the world would be humane and just. He gives us the gift of life and allows us to choose the way we will use our limited time on earth. It is an awesome opportunity.” —Cesar Chavez ****” “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” ―Frederick Buechner ***** “The words you speak become the house you live in.” ―Hafiz (translated by Ladinsky) ***** “Humans are the most intellectually advanced animal on the planet and yet, we are destroying our only home. The window of time is very small, but I refuse to believe that we cannot solve this problem.” ―Dr. Jane Goodall ***** “Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.” ―David Whyte ***** “Things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance even after the physical contact has been severed.” ―James Frazer ***** “Which world are we trying to sustain: a resource to fulfill our desires of material prosperity, or an Earth of wonder, beauty, and sacred meaning?” — Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee ***** “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” —John Steinbeck ***** “Crystals are living beings at the beginning of creation. All things have a frequency and a vibration.” —Nikola Tesla
Art by me and the AI. Robert Lee Brewer’s prompt today was to write a poem that begins, In the. . .
In the hard times, you could still hear the song. In the skeleton days when all you could do was to drop out of bed in the quiet dawn to pray, even then, you could hear it, the gentle melody underneath the jangling and dissonant voices that clamored for attention in your head. Even when your insides were displayed on street corners for all to see, the hopeful notes floated around you, small birds that only you could sense, like angels, leading you through the chanting crowds.
In the house made of sunlight and bone, where your spirit found shelter after the ravening creatures of malice and spite had picked your very soul clean of flesh and sinew, there, in the liquid autumn air, the music expanded, mending the breakage, tending the spaces like cobwebs, repairing the breaches, weaving the song through the aching gaps, declaring you whole.
Gratitude List:
The calm and peace of Friday evenings
That autumn slant of light
Leaves drifting gently down
I get by with a little help from my friends
Music
May we walk in Beauty!
(Today’s quotations come in pairs that interact with each other) “Both when we fall and when we get up again, we are kept in the same precious love.” ―Julian of Norwich * “What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved–what then?” ―Carl Jung ***** “I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” ―Eleanor Roosevelt * “If I had influence with the good fairy, I would ask that her gift to each child be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.” ―Rachel Carson **** “Your problem is you’re too busy holding onto your unworthiness.” ―Ram Dass * “In giving of yourself, you will discover a whole new life full of meaning and love.” ―Cesar Chavez **** “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ―Eugene V. Debs * “I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too. Ma Joad: I don’t understand it, Tom. Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.” ―Tom Joad, from the movie Grapes of Wrath
Mockingbird Chronicles 