A visit with the dogwoods

Yesterday’s sunrise.  If you had been standing outside with me at the time, you would have heard all manner of birds conversing and singing including a wild turkey who was hanging out in that liminal space between marsh and woods, gobbling.

Gratitude is most powerful as a response to the Earth because it provides an opening to reciprocity, to the act of giving back, to living in a way that the Earth will be grateful for us.

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

There’s a song that wants to sing itself through us. We just got to be available. Maybe the song that is to be sung through us is the most beautiful requiem for an irreplaceable planet or maybe it’s a song of joyous rebirth as we create a new culture that doesn’t destroy its world. But in any case, there’s absolutely no excuse for our making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, whether we think it’s going to go on forever. Those are just thoughts anyway. But this moment you’re alive, so you can just dial up the magic of that at any time.

~ Joanna Macy

A chilly Saturday in spring

Rooted on the dunes. (Cape Henlopen, Delaware.)

We have little needs and we have deeper needs.

We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs til we have almost lost our deeper needs in a kind of madness. Let us prepare now for the death of our present little life and the re-emergence in a bigger life in touch with the moving cosmos. It is a question practically of relationship. We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relationship to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual and re-awakening. We must once more practice the rituals of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath and the last. To these rituals we must return or we must evolve them to suit our needs. For the truth is we are perishing for the lack of fulfillment of our greater needs. We are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe.

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Beautiful acts

Hints of a season to come.

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.

~ Immanuel Kant

Matins

Morning has broken.  (Groundhog Day)

mat·ins

/ˈmatnz/

noun

1. a service of morning prayer in various churches, especially the Anglican Church.

   • a service forming part of the traditional Divine Office of the Western Christian Church, originally said (or chanted) at or after midnight, but historically often held with lauds on the previous evening.
   • LITERARY

     the morning song of birds.

Matins

~an excerpt from Morning Prayer Poem by John O’Donohue

1
Somewhere, out at the edges, the night
Is turning and the waves of darkness
Begin to brighten the shore of dawn

The heavy dark falls back to earth
And the freed air goes wild with light,
The heart fills with fresh, bright breath
And thoughts stir to give birth to color.

2
I arise today

In the name of Silence
Womb of the Word,
In the name of Stillness
Home of Belonging,
In the name of the Solitude
Of the Soul and the Earth.

(You can find the rest of this beautiful poem here.)

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 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