A Monday meander: Rainy days and Mondays

Early this morning.

As I get older, I realize the thing I value the most is good-heartedness.

~ Alice Walker

Many of us sense in the time of this current pandemic a great opportunity: it is as if we have collectively been sent indoors to do our essential human homework, to hit the pause button on our hyper-accelerating lives and reflect on what is really of value. It is to get into our hearts; to discover that being human is a magnificent thing; that each human being is a uniquely formed stream of creativity so perfectly designed to flow into communal rivers of renewal and into a great tidal shift that moves us in the years ahead to declare, “Powered by love? Indeed the whole thing is powered by love: every forest, every lake, every creature, every human, every galaxy is powered by love—by a love as potent and creative as we allow it to be.”

~ James O’Dea

Daisies and daylilies and more

Summer flowers.

Never forget the nine most important words of any family-

I love you.
You are beautiful.
Please forgive me.

~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

What we need is a culture where the common experience of trauma leads to a normalization of healing. Being able to say I have good reasons to be scared of the dark, of raised voices, of being swallowed up by love, of being alone. And being able to offer each other: I know a healer for you. I’ll hold your hand in the dark. Let’s begin a meditation practice. Perhaps talk therapy is not enough. We should celebrate love in our community as a measure of healing. The expectation should be — I know we are all in need of healing — so how are we doing our healing work?

~Adrienne Maree Brown: All of Me, Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body

A Monday meander: Short and sweet

A July full moon.

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong.  Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

~ George Washington Carver

Officially Walktober

Little hand, small flowers from the meadow.

[Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.  It is the one way of freedom.  If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.

~ Elizabeth von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

~ Barbara Brown Taylor

What would you create?

Around the pond at Breezy Acres (in northeast Ohio, last week).

That’s the trouble with people. their root problem.  Life runs alongside them, unseen.  Right here, right next.  Creating the soil.  Cycling water.  Trading in nutrients.  Making weather.  Building atmosphere  Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.

… If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.

~ when the trees speak in The Overstory by Richard Powers

Earthly energy

The alchemy of sunlight and earth.

Sit still and disengage normal activities.
Draw energy from the earth,
Admit power from the heavens.
Fertilize the seed within;
Let it sprout into a flower of pure light.

~ Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao: Daily Meditations

Spring travels

Vernal breath.

Can words describe the fragrance of the very breath of spring?

~ Neltje Blanchan

Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.

~ John Muir