Thank you Beth.
Tag: help
Walking. With a very little blow.
1,488 consecutive (almost) days that I’ve been on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. 12 days from 1,500 — more than four years of this Thing.
“And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.” – Ezra Pound
But before I leave the house, I flip through the morning papers. I know better, I do. But can’t seem to resist the rubbernecking. Ukraine. Israel. Gaza. Washington cesspool. China. Russia. North Korea. All feels dark and getting darker – the world’s shadows deepen.
“I could feel hope traveling backward to find us,
to whisper into our chests,
There will be music for you one day.” — Andrea Gibson
Weather app reads 59° F (?), but there’s a brisk wind from the North. Am I in Greenland? Glad I wore a jacket, I zip up.
I walk.
4:30 am. Wildlife is up. Smallest birds with the loudest voices break the silence of early morning. 4 other insomniacs are out sharing this twilight hour, each lost in their own quiet rhythm.
“Birdsong, wind, and waves.
It requires nothing more than to meet noise with stillness
and not commentary.” – Martin Laird
I walk.
Continue reading “Walking. With a very little blow.”Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
Think of the many times you’ve been a refuge: welcoming each stray street cat and abandoned potted plant and dear friend saved from heartache. This body has been warm. It’s given past what hands can give. This body has played lighthouse and homemaker and firefighter. You, a healing breeze; your body, the sky that moves it. A place of rest, a song sent by spring, a flickering light, a wish the world made.
— Schuyler Peck, “You Look Like Hell” (Game Over Books, June 6, 2023) (via Wait-What?)
In a sense every day is judgment day…
This quote is from a sermon that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, on August 11, 1957. The sermon was titled “Conquering Self-Centeredness” and it explored the theme of altruism versus selfishness. King urged his listeners to dedicate their lives to serving others and to follow the example of Jesus Christ12. He said:
In a sense every day is judgment day, and we, through our deeds and words, our silence and speech, are constantly writing in the Book of Life. Light has come into the world, and every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?”
Quote Source link here.
the only thing that can save us
[…] What he understood is the difference between charity and community — a difference founded in kinship, in recognizing that we all fall down, that sometimes it takes another hand to pull us up again. “All you have to do,” he once told the novelist Ann Patchett, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” ….
What Father Strobel understood is that compassion is the only thing that can save us.
— Margaret Renkl, from “Proof That One Life Can Change the World” (The New York Times · August 14, 2023)
Don’t miss rest of Margaret Renkl’s Opinion essay here.
Photo credit.