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

The Gift

Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.

So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part.
Love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful. 

That the gift has been given.

--Mary Oliver

[Photo from Queen Victoria Building, Sydney, Australia]

Gratitude

Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face across the table, of a son's outline against the mountains, is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit even stranger inner lives beneath calm surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s strange world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege.

Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets and fully beholds all other presences. Being unappreciative, feeling distant, might mean we are simply not paying attention.

--David Whyte

[Thanksgiving table of close family friends].

The Impeded Stream

There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.


--Wendell Berry

Worthy Always

Be confused, it’s where you begin to learn new things. 

Be broken, it’s where you begin to heal. 

Be frustrated, it’s where you start to make more authentic decisions. 

Be sad, because if we are brave enough 

we can hear our heart’s wisdom through it. 

Be whatever you are right now. 

No more hiding. You are worthy, always.

--S. C. Lourie

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief.  I come into the presence  of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

--Wendell Berry

[Photo of Colton Pond, Vermont

What the Day Gives

Suddenly, sun. Over my shoulder

in the middle of gray November

what I hoped to do comes back,

asking.

 

Across the street the fiery trees

hold onto their leaves,

red and gold in the final months

of this unfinished year,

they offer blazing riddles.

 

In the frozen fields of my life

there are no shortcuts to spring,

but stories of great birds in migration

carrying small ones on their backs,

predators flying next to warblers

they would, in a different season, eat.

 

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world

that plunges in a single day from despair

to hope and back again, I commend my life

to Ruskin’s most difficult duty of delight,

and to that most beautiful form of courage,

to be happy.

--Jeanne Lohmann

Close

is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, or close to losing faith: close to being happy, close to saying something we should or shouldn’t, close to success, and even, with a great sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.

Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there, we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation.

To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our usual protected sense of self in destabilizing joy, a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.

To consciously move closer is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the unavoidable losses that the essential vulnerability of being close might bring….

--David Whyte (excerpt)

[Photo of celebrating a new home]

Notice and Thanks

The sun will not rise or set 

without my notice, and thanks.

--Winslow Homer

Empower Me

Empower me to be a bold participant, 

rather than a timid saint in waiting, 

in the difficult ordinariness of now; 

to exercise the authority of honesty, 

rather than to defer to power, or deceive to get it; 

to influence someone for justice, 

rather than impress anyone for gain and, 

by grace, to find treasures of joy, of friendship, 

of peace hidden in the fields 

of the daily you give me to plow.

--Ted Loder

[Photo of childhood friends and chosen family]

Sometimes

Sometimes when day after day we have cloudless blue skies,
warm temperatures, colorful trees and brilliant sun, when
it seems like all this will go on forever,

when I harvest vegetables from the garden all day,
then drink tea and doze in the late afternoon sun,
and in the evening one night make pickled beets
and green tomato chutney, the next red tomato chutney,
and the day after that pick the fruits of my arbor
and make grape jam,

when we walk in the woods every evening over fallen leaves,
through yellow light, when nights are cool, and days warm,

when I am so happy I am afraid I might explode or disappear
or somehow be taken away from all this,

at those times when I feel so happy, so good, so alive, so in love
with the world, with my own sensuous, beautiful life, suddenly

I think about all the suffering and pain in the world, the agony
and dying. I think about all those people being tortured, right now,
in my name. But I still feel happy and good, alive and in love with
the world and with my lucky, guilty, sensuous, beautiful life because,

I know in the next minute or tomorrow all this may be
taken from me, and therefore I've got to say, right now,
what I feel and know and see, I've got to say, right now,
how beautiful and sweet this world can be.

--David Budbill

[Photo from Wallingford, VT]

I Want to Apologize

i want to apologize to all the women

i have called pretty.

before i’ve called them intelligent or brave.

i am sorry i made it sound as though

something as simple as what you’re born with

is the most you have to be proud of

when your spirit has crushed mountains

from now on i will say things like, you are resilient

or, you are extraordinary.

not because i don’t think you’re pretty.

but because you are so much more than that

-rupi kaur

[Photo of three generations of extraordinary women]

Love Wants to Know How

Autumn comes with its riot of death,
its clarion bells of color,
drives the living green to ground
even as it thins the veil between worlds.
The visible and invisible walk now together
with arms outstretched over fields
where workers hasten to the harvest
none may divide against itself.

So: where are you in this?
How long do you loiter
between the said and unsaid,
the done and undone,
between the half and true rhyme
of a life answering a life?

Geese mark the sky with dark wedges,
call with harsh tongues
to what thrives at the margins
of all we so reluctantly receive.
Go now,
quickly and with great force,
toward what burns in your dreams
at the dying of the year.

Who can say?
Perhaps you reap the whirlwind,
perhaps the harvest—
but is it ever enough to not know
the bonds and bounds of what will one day
forsake you for the grave?

--Anonymous 

[Photo of Kent Pond, Killington, VT]

What the World Needs

Don't ask yourself

what the world needs,

ask yourself what

makes you come alive,

and then go do it.

Because what the

world needs is people

who have come alive.

--Howard Thurman

Rise Strong

Our job is not to deny the story, 

but to defy the ending

—to rise strong, 

recognize our story, 

and rumble with the truth 

until we get to a place 

where we think, Yes. 

This is what happened. 

And I will choose how the story ends.

–- Brené Brown

Some Say You're Lucky

Some say you're lucky
If nothing shatters it.

But then you wouldn't
Understand poems or songs.
You'd never know
Beauty comes from loss.

It's deep inside every person:
A tear tinier
Than a pearl or thorn.

It's one of the places
Where the beloved is born.

--Gregory Orr