Photo: by Toby Melville/Reuters from wsj.com – Thousands of wading birds flying onto sandbanks during high tide at The Wash estuary in Norfolk, England.
It’s been a long day
October 10, 2017 by 19 Comments
The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
~ Jack Gilbert, “Waking at Night” (The Greensboro Review, Fall 2008)
Notes:
- Photo: luci d’inverno with When did I lose colors?. Poem: via see more
- Related Posts: It’s been a long day
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
October 9, 2017 by 36 Comments
Notes:
- Inspired by Frank Ostaseski in his book titled The Five Invitations where he shares five habits of mind, orientations of spirit — through which an untruculent acceptance of death can become a love-expanding, life-expanding force: (1) Don’t wait. (2) Welcome everything, push away nothing. (3) Bring your whole self to the experience. (4) Find a place of rest in the middle of things. (5) Cultivate don’t know mind. In the remainder of The Five Invitations, Ostaseski delves deeper into each of these precepts to distill its vital lifeblood into insights and practices with which to enrich and ennoble our diurnal existence. (Source: Brain Pickings)
- Photo Manipulation: 2nd Photo “Splash” by Maurizio Raffa via 500px.com. First Photo purportedly by Raffa via mennyfox55)
Saturday Morning
October 7, 2017 by 22 Comments
It’s a gift, this cloudless … morning
warm enough to walk without a jacket
along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing
of your feet through fallen leaves should be
enough to quiet the mind…
The rising wind pulls you out of it,
and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
wheeling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
and lifting above the treetops, as if the whole day
were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
for this moment at least, let it all go.
~ Jeffrey Harrison, from Enough
Notes: Poem from Poets.org. Photo: niaz uddin (Eastern Sierra Mountains)
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
September 18, 2017 by 13 Comments
This day, then, ends in rain
but almost everyone will live through it.
Tomorrow’s thousands losing their loved ones
have not yet stepped into never being the same again.
Maybe the sun’s first light will hit me
in those moments, but I’d gladly wake to feel it:
the dramatic opening of a day,
clean blood pumping from the heart.
– Michael Ryan, from Poem at Thirty in New and Selected Poems
Notes: Poem: Thank you Whiskey River. Photo: Kelly Winton Photography for a book cover for “Pages For Her” by Sylvia Brownrigg (via mennyfox55)
of the things you have to do today…
September 12, 2017 by 24 Comments
Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,
between “green thread”
and “broccoli,” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”
Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend
and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,
and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is that also needs accomplishing…
~ Tony Hoagland, from “The Word” in Sweet Ruin.
Poem Source: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: (via Newthom)
Lightly Child, Lightly.
August 10, 2017 by 35 Comments
The love a parent feels for a child is strange…
It’s like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who’s lived their whole life in a dark room.
It sends the soul flying.
~ Fredrick Backman, from Beartown: A Novel (Atria Books; Tra edition, April 25, 2017)
Notes:
- Photo: Kristy G. Photography (via Newthom)
- Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
