Friday ~ May 25, 2018

Forgiveness is not an abstraction for it needs a body to feel its relief.
Knees, shoulders, spine are required to adore the lightness of a burden removed.
Grief, like a journey over water completed, slides its keel in the packed sand reef.
Forgiveness is contact with belief that your only life must now be lived.

(Molly Peacock, b. 1947)

Thursday ~ May 24, 2018

I talk to you with visible and palpable words,
words with weight, flavor, and smell, like things.
While I speak,
things imperceptibly shake loose from themselves, escaping toward other forms, other names.
They leave me these words: with them, I talk to you.
Words are bridges.
And they are traps, jails, wells.
I talk to you: you do not hear me.
I don't talk with you: I talk with a word.
That word is you.,
that carries you from yourself to yourself.
You, I, and fate created it.

(Octavio Paz, 1914 - 1908)

Wednesday ~ May 23, 2018

All of us want to be loved unconditionally.
We crave that love.
We are born craving to be loved unconditionally.
Some of us become warped and crippled from the lack of that love,
some of us become stunted, some of us sicked,
some of us die from that lack of love.
Maybe the health and vibrancy of the universe too
depends on a love like that.
Maybe the creation is not finished.

(Pattiann Rogers, b. 1940)

Tuesday ~ May 22, 2018

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now.
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair;
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

 (Langston Hughs, 1902 - 1967)

Monday ~ May 14, 2018

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not die in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom, goes on as fruit.

(Dawna Markova, b. 1942)

Sunday ~ April 22, 2018

Why, who makes such a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the of the water,
Or stand under the trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with anyone I love, or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at a table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or watch animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

(Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892)

Friday ~ April 13, 2018

You are ruminating about the past, or worrying about the future, you will completely miss the experience... The past is finished. Learn from it and let it go. The future is not even here yet. Plan for it, but do not waste your time worrying about it. Worrying is worthless. When you stop ruminating about what has already happened, when you stop worrying about what might never happen, then you will be in the present moment.
Then you will begin to experience joy in life.

(Thich Nhat Hanh, b. 1926)