What You See

Today was Lancaster’s Race Against Racism, a couple-thousand-person 5K, in which the community works to raise money for the anti-racism efforts of the local YWCA. I haven’t walked it in six years. Last time, I walked/ran with my then-8-year-old. Today my husband and I walked while the kid, now 14 and a tall leggy runner, ran. He did it in a little over twenty minutes. Jon finished in just over an hour, and I was about ten minutes behind Jon. I walked with a friend who is also somewhat short, and we had a rich conversation while strolling through the city.


A couple days ago, Robert Lee Brewer’s prompt was to write and anapodoton poem. An anapodoton, according to Wiktionary, is “a rhetorical device in which a main clause of a phrase that is not mentioned is implied by a subordinate clause that is mentioned.” I didn’t write one then, but today’s prompt to write about something you see, offered me the “What you see” phrase.


Gratitude List:
1. Lancaster and York Cities and their Races Against Racism. Such important work.
2. Good friends and good conversations
3. My siblings
4. My parents
5. The green glow of trees breathing
May we walk in Beauty!


“To love, my brothers and sisters, does not mean we have to agree. But maybe agreeing to love is the greatest agreement. And the only one that ultimately matters, because it makes a future possible.” —Michael B. Curry


“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.” —Barry H. Gillespie


“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.” —Ursula K Le Guin


“There is room for you at our table, if you choose to join us.” —Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing


“For beautiful to happen, the beautiful has got to be seen.” —from the musical “Ordinary Days”


“You will be found.” —from the musical “Dear Evan Hansen”
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“How do you become the person you’ve forgotten you ever were?” —from the musical “Anastasia”


“The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.” ―Joseph Gordon-Levitt


To all the children
by Thomas Berry

To the children who swim beneath
The waves of the sea, to those who live in
The soils of the Earth, to the children of the flowers
In the meadows and the trees of the forest,
To all those children who roam over the land
And the winged ones who fly with the winds,
To the human children too, that all the children
May go together into the future in the full
Diversity of their regional communities.


Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”


“Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi (Barks)


“You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.” ―Isabel Allende


“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy – the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ―Bréne Brown, Wholehearted

Pillar of Salt

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Today you turn, you twist,
look back to the beginning of now,
throw your tears over your shoulder,
salt enough for any god’s pillar.

How does it weigh?
The balances and the boundaries,
the feather and the soul?
Can you say what you have learned?
What will you carry with you into the wilderness?
Which character will you play in the coming cycle?

TOMORROW’S PROMPT:

We’ve come to the end of the Fool’s journey. Tomorrow we face the World. The World Tree. The World Web. The World of Dreams. Here comes the future. Today, we looked back at the work of the past. Tomorrow we face the future, wind in our hair, sun on our faces. Are we right back where we began? Or do we set our own Fool’s feet upon a whole new road? We’ve traveled one circuit of the circle. We’ve made one round of the labyrinth. Now we carry the new mysteries and secrets into the coming cycle. How does that look to you?

Gratitude List:

  1. Race Against Racism today in Lancaster. Such good people, running in the rain. My young running buddy was a good companion–we actually walked it mostly.
  2. The Islamic Community Center, who invited my church to race with them. I felt so welcomed.
  3. The Spoken Word poets and storytellers. This is another incredible community of people that I am honored to be part of. This year they chose one of my poems as the ensemble poem. It gives me chills to hear my words in these powerful voices.
  4. Truth. That’s the theme of this year’s Spoken Word Play. I love all the different takes on the topic, how our ideas blend together.
  5. Friends who will stop and pick your flowers. A friend came by today, and when we didn’t hear her knocking, she picked herself a little bouquet of lilies of the valley. I felt so treasured.

May we walk in Beauty!

Awash

Today’s prompt is to write an across the sea poem.  Here’s a haiku:

Alas!  I’m awash
in this sea of a season.
I’ll drown in that green.

Gratitude List:
1. Ferns unfurling
2. YWCA and its anti-racism work.  I was proud to support it by joining the Race today.
3. Shakespeare.  I am awash in his poetry.
4. The way the streetlight turned the new leaves on those trees by the Rutt building to a fairy golden.
5. Reading books with the kids in the new fort that Jon built out by the United Melvin Hall.

May we walk in Beauty!