Mary Oliver Poem

What we love, shapely and pure,
is not to be held,
but to be believed in.
-Mary Oliver

Walt Whitman

Paying Attention

In the end
you won’t be known
for the things you did
or what you built,
or what you said.

You won’t even be known
for the love given
or the hearts saved,

because in the end you won’t be known.

You won’t be asked, by a vast creator full of light:
What did you do to be known?

You will be asked: Did you know it,
this place, this journey?

What there is to know can’t be written.
Something between crispness of air
And glint in her eye
And texture of the orange peel.

What you’ll want a thousand years from now is this:
A memory that beats like a heart—

You are here to pay attention. That is enough.

-Tara Sophia Mohr

KINDNESS

KINDNESS
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth,
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

A Great Need

A Great Need
Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.
Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous
For
That.
-Hafiz

"Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower" by Rainer Maria Rilke; translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.



Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29


"Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower"
by Rainer Maria Rilke; translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Buddha

You can search the whole universe

and not find a single being more worthy of love than yourself.

Since each and every person is so precious to themselves,

Let the self-respecting harm no other being.


- Buddha

Rumi

"On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs
to open and the love starts. Today is such a day."
~Rumi

July 23

Come To The Edge.

Come to the edge, he said.
We are afraid, they said.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came to the edge,
He pushed them and they flew.

Come to the edge, Life said.
They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge, Life said.
They came. It pushed them...
And they flew.

-Guilliame Apollinaire

Let me Sow Love

Sigh

It seems it's even more urgent to share the love these days. A lot of suffering around me only makes me want to believe in the power of love, to trust the journey, the path, your own heart.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

� Mary Oliver.

HAFIZ

Even after all this time the Sun never says to the Earth "You owe me"
Look at what happens to a love like that.
It lights the whole world.--- Hafiz

Farewell 2009

Happy New Year!!

A New Year's Blessing

May your brilliance be reflected in the eyes of all you meet.
May the blessings of Life be felt in thought, word and deed.

May you drink deeply from Wisdom's cup.
May you see the gift in every challenge, the sacred in every step.

May laughter roll your belly as you delight in Creation's mystery.
May you breathe freely, love deeply, rejoice wildly and create
passionately.

May you be at peace, whether your bowl be empty or full.
May the Light of Love shine brightly upon your soul.

May you listen deeply within, faithfully heeding the guidance of Spirit.
May you wake to dream each day, remembering NOW is all there IS.

May you feel the energy of co-creation flowing through each hand.
May you remember to honour and give thanks for our Mother the land!

May you experience the bliss of a well-lived day ...
Forgiving ignorance; releasing regret, guilt or shame.

May you be sovereign, and to thine own Self be true.
May you remember each person makes a difference ...
... and that person is YOU!

Many blessings always and in all ways ...

Ukehi Shiiji (Thank you for being our heart)

By Stacey Robyn and the ground crew of Go Gratitude

Serve it up!

"The best way to find your self is to lose yourself in the service of others."-Gandhi

One of the things I love most about photography is the sense of service I feel creating photographic memories for people from their wedding, family portrait, bat mitzvahs etc.

It is truly a privilege to bear witness to these intimate events and I give thanks for the opportunities to do the work I so love creating and sharing.

"As Once the Winged Energy of Delight"

"As Once the Winged Energy of Delight"

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the God
wants to know itself in you.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Thought for this Monday

It takes a long time to play like yourself-Miles Davis


And a very happy birthday to BOTH of my sisters, who share this birthday 2 years apart!

Confucius

It does not matter how slow you go, so long as you do not stop.
-Confucius

David Whyte

What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk?


by David Whyte © 1999 Many Rivers Press

Mud-luscious

In Just

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

-- e. e. cummings

INTEGRITY

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.-- Martin Luther King, Jr.