Spend Every Moment on Love

Our time in this magical world is so much more brief and precious than we realize. Spend it on love. Spend it on the people, on the animals, in the places that make you peaceful, blissful, awake, alive. Spend it in pristine silences and joyful clatter. Spend it giving all of yourself, fearlessly. Spend it being your authentic self. Spend it with eyes wide open to all that calls to gratitude. Spend it letting go of what does not matter. Spend it on that which summons the best of you, which makes you more than you imagined you could be, something that leaves you replete, something that makes you new. Spend it opened, true, unafraid. Spend it choosing that which makes you most fully alive. Spend it on that which lifts you to places from which you can see forever.

Spend it, every sweet moment of it, on love.

--Laura Hillenbrand

[Baasch Family photo of Christmas fun with game "Speakout"]

A Piece of the Storm

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That’s all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."

--Mark Strand

The Winter of Listening

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

All this trying
to know
who we are
and all this
wanting to know
exactly
what we must do.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire.

What disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born…

--David Whyte (excerpt)

For Citizenship

In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety
And someone has stolen
The horizons and the mountains,

Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness

They keep their heads down
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From Aluminum economic ground,

The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.

The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe

We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress

That we may have courage
To turn aside from it all

And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home.

--John O'Donohue (published 2007)

Welcome Home

Alone in the alien, snow-blown woods,
moving hard to stay warm in zero weather,
I stop on a rise to catch my breath as the
setting sun—streaming through bare-boned
trees—falls upon my face, fierce and full of life.

Breathing easier now, in and out with the earth,
I suddenly feel accepted—feel myself stand
easy, strong, deep-rooted as the trees,
while time and all these troubles disappear.

And when (who knows how long?) I trudge
on down the trail and find my ancient burdens
returning, I stop once more to say No to them—
not here, not now, not ever again—reclaiming
the welcome home the woods have given me.

--Parker J. Palmer