The World Loves You Back

Even if no one ever touched you

with the tenderness you needed,

believe that the world’s been

holding you in its arms since

the day you were born. You are

not an accident or afterthought.

Let rain on the roof remind you.

Let sun on the skin, and the neon-

orange of the Mexican sunflower

at which a hummingbird pauses

to drink. There are so many ways

to hold and be held, and you

could spend your whole life

tallying them up, without ever

reaching the end of the list.

—James Crews

August Sunrise

Our minds give off the light

that reveals the connections

linking us one to the other

like the newly risen sun

making visible the dew-

tipped spider webs spun

in the fields last night:

each shining thread drawing

the separate blades of grass

closer together, weaving

a wide patchwork net

which catches everything

that flies into its path.

—James Crews

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

- Wendell Berry

For all that has been — thanks. For all that shall be — yes.

--Dag Hammarskjold

 No matter where life takes you, the place that you stand at any moment is holy ground. Love hard, and love wide and love long and you will find the goodness in it.

--Susan Vreeland

 No amount of regret changes the past. No amount of anxiety changes the future. Any amount of gratitude changes the present.

-Ann Voskamp

 Embodied presence is an invitation, again and again, to soften, to settle, to relax, to open up to what’s here. When we’re driven along by our habitual thinking patterns, we’re holding those tensions. A free body is a relaxed body, an open body.

--Martin Aylward

 Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity.

--Robin Wall Kimmerer

 Attention is the doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity.

--Robin Wall Kimmerer

 Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily, and I must return the gift.

–Robin Wall Kimmerer

Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.

--bell hooks 

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Joan Didion

Stone

And what am I doing here, in a yurt on the side of a hill

at the ragged edge of the tree line, sheltered by conifer and bay,

watching the wind lift, softly, the dry leaves of bamboo?

I lie on the floor and let the sun fall across my back, 

as I have been for the past hour, listening to the distant traffic,

to the calls of birds I cannot name. Once, I had so much

I wanted to accomplish. Now, all I know is that I want

to get closer to it - to the rocky slope, the orange petals

of the nasturtium adorning the fence, the wind's sudden breath.

Close enough that I can almost feel, at night, the slight pressure

of the stars against my skin. Isn't this what the mystics meant

when they spoke of forsaking the world? Not to turn our backs to it,

only to its elaborate plots, its complicated pleasures - 

in favor of the pine's long shadow, the slow song of the grass.

I'm always forgetting, and remembering, and forgetting.

I want to leave something here in the rough dirt: a twig,

a small stone - perhaps this poem - a reminder to begin,

again, by listening carefully with the body's rapt attention

- remember? To this. to this.

--Danusha Lameris

The Traveling Onion

When I think how far the onion has traveled

just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise

all small forgotten miracles,

crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,

pearly layers in smooth agreement,

the way the knife enters onion

and onion falls apart on the chopping block,

a history revealed.

And I would never scold the onion

for causing tears.

It is right that tears fall

for something small and forgotten.

How at meal, we sit to eat,

commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma

but never on the translucence of onion,

now limp, now divided,

or its traditionally honorable career:

For the sake of others,

disappear.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

The Way It Is

Over and over we break

open, we break and

we break and we open.

For a while, we try to fix

the vessel—as if

to be broken is bad.

As if with glue and tape

and a steady hand we

might bring things to perfect

again. As if they were ever

perfect. As if to be broken is not

also perfect. As if to be open

is not the path toward joy.

The vase that’s been shattered

and cracked will never

hold water. Eventually

it will leak. And at some

point, perhaps, we decide

that we’re done with picking

our flowers anyway, and no

longer need a place to contain them

We watch them grow just

as wildflowers do—unfenced,

unmanaged, blossoming only

when they’re ready—and my god,

how beautiful they are amidst

the mounting pile of shards.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

 In a world pocked by cynicism and pummeled by devastating news, to find joy for oneself and spark it in others, to find hope for oneself and spark it in others, is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance. This is not a matter of denying reality – it is a matter of discovering a parallel reality where joy and hope are equally valid ways of being. To live there is to live enchanted with the underlying wonder of reality, beneath the frightful stories we tell ourselves and are told about it.

—Maria Popova

What is there beyond knowing

What is there beyond knowing that keeps

calling to me? I can't

turn in any direction

but it's there. I don't mean

the leaves' grip and shine or even the thrush's

silk song, but the far-off

fires, for example,

of the stars, heaven's slowly turning

theater of light, or the wind

playful with its breath;

or time that's always rushing forward,

or standing still

in the same—what shall I say—

moment.

What I know

I could put into a pack

as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it

on one shoulder,

important and honorable, but so small!

While everything else continues, unexplained

and unexplainable.  How wonderful it is

to follow a thought quietly

to its logical end.

I have done this a few times.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,

in the middle of the world, breathing

in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name

but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet.

I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass 

    and the weeds. 

--Mary Oliver

 Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.

- John Lubbock

The Ask

Among your duties, pleasure is a thing that also needs accomplishing.

            —Tony Hoagland, “The Word”

 Perhaps it looked like I was dancing,

but I was being danced, was being twirled

by some great mystical spinning wheel

turning the straw of my thoughts into gold.

What a gift to have a body, to be alive

on a night when the sun is warm

and the grass is green and the mountains

are not yet tinder dry and the music is joyful

and the minutes slip through the hours

like page after page of happily ever

and there is no imp to be seen, just

the glory of brass shining in the air

and the miracle of hands clapping

as if applause is the only response that makes sense,

and the only thing the world asks of me

is to love it.

-- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Joy

The asters shake from stem to flower

waiting for the monarchs to alight.

Every butterfly knows that the end

is different from the beginning

and that it is always a part

of a longer story, in which we are always

transformed. When it's time to fly,

you know how, just the way you knew

how to breathe, just the way the air

knew to find its way into your lungs,

the way the geese know when to depart,

the way their wings know how to

speak to the wind, a partnership of feather

and glide, lifting into the blue dream.

-- Stuart Kestenbaum

 This universe is much too big to hold onto, but it is the perfect size for letting go.

--Sharon Salzberg

The Runes

In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the

arms — so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down.

-Denise Levertov

 Bad times, hard times – this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: such as we are, such are the times....You are hoping for the good; be what you hope for.

--St Augustine of Hippo

We will never be the same again.

But here’s a little secret for you: no one is ever the same thing again after anything. You are never the same twice, and much of your unhappiness comes from trying to pretend that you are. Accept that you are different each day, and do so joyfully, recognizing it for the gift it is. Work within the desires and goals of the person you are currently, until you aren’t that person anymore, and everything changes once again.

"Welcome to Night Vale"

The person who's in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer