I can't sleep…
Our time always shortening.
What we cherish always temporary. What we love
is, sooner or later, changed…
Giving thanks for what we are allowed
to think about it, grateful for it even as it wanes…
And occasionally the bright sound of broken glass.
All of it a blessing. The being there. Being alive then.
Like a giant bell ringing long after you can’t hear it.
~ Jack Gilbert, excerpt from “Burma” from Refusing Heaven
Notes: Poem via Mythology of Blue. Photo: Maximus Audacious of Bell
Take a breath…
Don’t swallow the sun
The moon isn’t bright enough…
I promise I’ll be a better person this time next year.
If you’re reading this…
Congratulations, you’re alive.
If that’s not something to smile about, then I don’t know what is.
― Chad Sugg, from “Swallow the Sun” in Monsters Under Your Head
Notes:
Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.
~ Virginia Woolf
Photo: Padma Inguva (via Aberrant Beauty). Quote: via Memory’s Landscape
When the night slides under with the last dimming star
and the red sky lightens between the trees,
and the heron glides tipping heavy wings in the river,
when crows stir and cry out their harsh joy,
and swift creatures of the night run toward their burrows,
and the deer raises her head and sniffs the freshening air,
and the shadows grow more distinct and then shorten,
then we rise into the day still clean as new snow.
The cat washes its paw and greets the day with gratitude.
Every day we find a new sky and a new earth
with which we are trusted like a perfect toy…
We are given the wind within us, the breath
to shape into words that steal time…
Yet holy breath still stretches our lungs to sing.
We are lent for a time these minerals in water
and a morning every day, a morning to wake up,
rejoice and praise life in our spines, our throats,
our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues…
We are given passion to rise
like the sun in our minds with the new day
and burn the debris of habit and greed and fear.
We stand in the midst of the burning world
primed to burn with compassionate love and justice,
to turn inward and find holy fire at the core,
to turn outward and see the world that is all
of one flesh with us, see under the trash, through
the smog, the furry bee in the apple blossom,
the trout leaping, the candles our ancestors lit for us…
Let silence still us so you may show us your shining
and we can out of that stillness rise and praise.
~ Marge Piercy, from “Nishmat in “Available Light
Notes: Poem – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: Marta Navarro
“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”
~ Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Photo: Nacia Photography