Happy Solstice

In a meadow of delight.

A Blessing for the New Year
BEANNACHT

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble
May the clay dance
To balance you

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The gray window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colors,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
In the curragh of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

…from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, Doubleday, 2008 by John O’Donohue

A Monday meander: Words

A week or so ago.

It is only through letting our heart break that we discover something unexpected: the heart cannot actually break–it can only break open. To live with an open heart is to experience life full-strength.

~John Welwood

3. Snow day

Blue day.

There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million.

~Walt Streightiff

Let me keep my mind on what matters which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

~Mary Oliver

2. #DSFWeekly Rewind: An afternoon on Assateague Island

A walk on the beach.

Often we feel time to be linear, inexorable, suffocating. At other moments we find it oceanic. We kind of swim in it. We expect physicists to come up with an explanation, but we don’t find one, and come back to our intuitive use of the concept. But there are also moments when time appears to be, to say it in one way, both vertical and horizontal, both “single-minded,” monotonous, unalterable, and multi-dimensional, infinite. When a few people come together, I often have wondered if each person’s amount of years was not being added to the amount of years of all the others, so that we were representing together much more than our single self. And if you add up the simultaneous ages of people, animals, plants, objects, the age of celestial bodies and so on, you realize that we are living in the unfolding of the infinite. But why bother? I think because we need to keep in mind the immensity of being, in spite of our fragility and mortality.

~ Etel Adnan

1. Fifty-nine

Birthday gift from M.

Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.

~ Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

If everything is urgent

Sunset on Monday.

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the old Norse ‘los’ meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places… I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

~ Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost