A Monday meander on a Thursday: Casselman Bridge

There is an abundance of goldenrod this year.

Maybe we will be better human beings when we begin to see all the other things a place is besides all the things we think it is or wanted it to be.

~ Brian Doyle

But you cannot control everything…All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference…You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow…That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.

~ Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song

Hanging laundry

On the clothesline this morning.

The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion … open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.

~ Orhan Pamuk

A Monday meander: Around the ranch

Make some fried green tomatoes? Or wait until they ripen and have a tomato sandwich?

Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don’t know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you’ve built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place of gravity and stability, where our feet can still touch ground.

~ Deb Caletti

Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.  This is a daunting form of commitment: to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is.

~ Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope

Eat the rules

A recent sunset.

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.
— Abraham Heschel

I think that every discovery of the world plunges us into jubilation, a radical amazement that tears apart the veil of triviality.
— Dorothee Soelle

Oh, the joy

New blooms.

Healing does not require that you master the unreasonable side of your reason. Nor does healing require inner perfection of any order. A common trait shared by people who have healed is that they cease being unreasonable in ways that no longer matter in the greater scheme of life. Against the scale of life or death, how important is winning an argument? How important is holding a grudge? How important is anything other than how well we love others, how deeply we regard the value of the gift of life, and what we do with our life that makes this world a better place?

~ Caroline Myss

I believe our survival demands revolution, both cultural and political. If we are to survive the disasters that threaten, and survive our own struggle to make it new – a struggle I believe we have no choice but to commit ourselves to – we need tremendous transfusions of imaginative energy. If it is indeed revolution we are moving toward, we need life, and abundantly – we need poems of the spirit, to inform us of the essential, to help us live the revolution. And if instead it be the Last Days – then we need to taste the dearest, freshest drops before we die – why bother with anything less than that, the essential?

~ Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World

Morning walk

A bouquet in a field of wheat.

The ancient words of the Orthodox liturgy, or the Om mani padme hum, or the Upanishads, have an incantatory power — a power of invoking that which they seek to invoke — because they have been repeatedly uttered.  But they have been repeatedly uttered because millions have trusted them.  To take etymology really seriously is to trust words.

And perhaps that’s what it’s all about.  In my less depressive moments, I think that there’s a deep and universal principle at work — which is that if you really, really trust the world (a world that includes words) and make yourself wholly vulnerable in the event of your trust being misplaced, the world always honors and rewards the trust and vulnerability.  You can call it faith or grace if you want.

~ Charles Foster, Emergence Magazine

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The moon’s breath

Sunrise this morning.

The morning sings.
The egg-shaped moon
is exhaling clouds.
I breathe in and
exhale a song of my own.
I listen
as the symphony of birds
respond with hymns
of spring.