A Monday meander: So you want to write

Near the edge.  (Blackwater Falls State Park, West Virginia.  October 2021.)

In life, there are brief and momentary opportunities that ask us to assert our existence. Although a creative impulse, they can be destructive, because they make us veer away from our normal patterns and habits. Life is compelling us to take these small acts of rebellion so we can go beyond the edges of ourselves, and by doing so, we end up rediscovering ourselves. These moments are a great reminder that, like all other animals, we are, and will always be, wild.

~ Kamand Kojouri

What good is a dream that doesn’t test the mettle of the dreamer? What good is a path that doesn’t carry us to the edge of our capacity and then beyond that place? A true calling involves a great exposure before it can become a genuine refuge.

~ Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny, The Two Agreements of the Soul

The kitchen table

The moon this morning.

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us…but we can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold.

~ Audre Lorde

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.

~ Galway Kinnell

A bit more from last week’s snow day

Izzy, contemplating what might be out there.

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness – from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.

~ Rebecca Solnit

We belong to the earth, we belong to the sky.  We inter-are.  Wisdom, compassion, body, mind are not separate.

~ Roshi Joan Halifax

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.

~ David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

A Monday meander: The woolly bear and winter

Outside of the county health department, after my last Covid test (it came back negative, by the way).  What do you think the woolly bear is predicting?  A mild or severe winter?

Life is no different than the weather. Not only is it unpredictable, but it shows us a new perspective of the world every day.

~ Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun

We listen too much to the telephone and we listen too little to nature. The wind is one of my sounds. A lonely sound, perhaps, but soothing. Everybody should have his personal sounds to listen for — sounds that will make him exhilarated and alive, or quiet and calm. . . . As a matter of fact, one of the greatest sounds of them all — and to me it is a sound — is utter, complete silence.

~ Andre Kostelanetz, Sunbeams, January 2022

A blessing

A sunset from Chincoteague.

At The End Of The Year

— A Blessing by John O’Donohue

As this year draws to its end,
We give thanks for the gifts it brought
And how they became inlaid within
Where neither time nor tide can touch them.

The days when the veil lifted
And the soul could see delight;
When a quiver caressed the heart
In the sheer exuberance of being here.

Surprises that came awake
In forgotten corners of old fields
Where expectation seemed to have quenched.

The slow, brooding times
When all was awkward
And the wave in the mind
Pierced every sore with salt.

The darkened days that stopped
The confidence of the dawn.

Days when beloved faces shone brighter
With light from beyond themselves;
And from the granite of some secret sorrow
A stream of buried tears loosened.

We bless this year for all we learned,
For all we loved and lost
And for the quiet way it brought us
Nearer to our invisible destination.

Watching the sunrise through the hydrangea.  (From August.)

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receeding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

~ R.S.Thomas

A day away

Dancing with the sunrise. (Yesterday. Do you see the dancer in the sky?  Or maybe you see an angel?)

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

~ bell hooks