Photography by Irving Penn (via this isn’t happiness)
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
February 4, 2019 by 32 Comments
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
January 28, 2019 by 32 Comments
“When it’s cold you can see the song.”
A blue tit appears to be sending smoke signals as it braves sub-zero temperatures in a park in the city of Petrozavodsk, Russia. Mikhail Kalinin, 34, an electric locomotive engineer spotted the chirping bird’s condensation rising up out from it’s beak with the temperature below -5 degrees celsius. (via Solent News & Photo Agency)
Photo: Mikhail Kalinin. Thank you Beth.
r u kin?
January 25, 2019 by 21 Comments
If I get up now, I can make coffee. I can walk down the stairs, go to the kitchen, and make myself coffee. Maybe sit down and write. I can hear my husband breathing. Our daughter breathing…The dog breathing. If I listen, I can hear cars out on the road, it’s still nighttime, or early morning, it depends on who you are, how you were raised, what experiences you bring to the different times of day, it’s three forty-five now, do you call that morning or night, I call it morning, but too early to get up, I check the time on my cell phone and then I check my messages, I sit up and lie down, a few cars drive past right outside my window, there and there and there, and farther off a gentler stream, cars driving past at night sound different from cars driving past in the daytime. Today is the first of _ _ _ _ _ ….
~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel” (W. W. Norton & Company, January 15, 2019)
Photo: Eric Rose
Tuesday Morning Wake-Up Call
January 22, 2019 by 33 Comments
When you get into your car, shut the door and be there for just half a minute. Breathe, feel the energy inside your body, look around at the sky, the trees. The mind might tell you, ‘I don’t have time.’ But that’s the mind talking to you. Even the busiest person has time for 30 seconds of space.
– Eckhart Tolle, from Oprah Talks to Eckhart Tolle (Oprah.com)
Notes: Quote – Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Photo: maggie kirkpatrick
Monday Morning
January 14, 2019 by 20 Comments
january wakes up with the first light of dawn. swings his feet out from beneath the blankets to touch a cold floor. the air around his is quiet and crisp. today starts a new day. a day to be kinder. a day to be braver. a day to be more.
~ Kelsey Danielle, @ Misguided Ghosts
Photo Credit
First Day Back
January 2, 2019 by 41 Comments
First day back after 2 weeks off…Sunny side up and Easy, way over easy…
Photo: Slowdown Studio (via Swiss-miss)
I love the dawn stillness (on Thanksgiving Day)
November 22, 2018 by 35 Comments
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes: Photo: Mennyfox55
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
November 19, 2018 by 33 Comments
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
