How mutuality works in a community

 Tiffany couldn't quite work out how Miss Level got paid. Certainly the basket she carried filled up more than it emptied. They'd walk past a cottage and a woman would come scurrying out with a fresh-baked loaf or a jar of pickles, even though Miss Level hadn't stopped there. But they'd spend an hour somewhere else, stitching up the leg of a farmer who'd been careless with an axe, and get a cup of tea and a stale biscuit. It didn't seem fair.

"Oh, it evens out," said Miss Level, as they walked on through the woods. "You do what you can. People give what they can, when they can. Old Slapwick there, with the leg, he's as mean as a cat, but there'll be a big cut of beef on my doorstep before the week's end, you can bet on it. His wife will see to it. And pretty soon people will be killing their pigs for the winter, and I'll get more brawn, ham, bacon, and sausages turning up than a family could eat in a year." 

"You do? What do you do with all that food?"

"Store it," said Miss Level.

"But you--"

"I store it in other people. It's amazing what you can store in other people." Miss Level laughed at Tiffany's expression. "I mean, I take what I don't need round to those who don't have a pig, or who're going through a bad patch, or who don't have anyone to remember them."

"But that means they'll owe you a favour!"

"Right! And so it just keeps on going round. It all works out."

"I bet some people are too mean to pay--"

"Not pay," said Miss Level severely. "A witch never expects payment and never asks for it and just hopes she never needs to. But, sadly, you are right."

"And then what happens?"

"What do you mean?"

"You stop helping them, do you?"

"Oh, no," said Miss Level, genuinely shocked. "You can't not help people just because they're stupid or forgetful or unpleasant. Everyone's poor round here. If I don't help them, who will?"

--Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Joy is much bigger than happiness. 

 --Archbishop Desmond Tutu

 “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. "

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

After the First Snow Storm

Just when I believed

autumn would last forever

it didn’t.

Not that I really thought

the gold leaves would stay.

Not that I really believed

the warm days were endless—

but part of me wanted them to be.

And so this cold morning,

driving on ice

when I feel the slip of the wheels

as they lose traction,

the heart resonates

with the skid.

Oh, this lesson

in losing control.

Oh, this remembering

how quickly it all slides by—

the light, the warmth,

the deepening gold,

even this fleeting understanding

of how quickly

it all slides by.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

To Existing Being Enough

On days like today, you're just existing,

and that's fine.

The ocean is not always a tsunami.

The wind is not always a tornado.

You are no less powerful

in all your stillness.

--Natasha T. Miller, from Butcher

Generosity keeps faith with our appreciation of each other. It stems from a natural empathy with everything that, like us, has the courage to take a shape in the world.

--John Tarrant

Why some people be mad at me sometimes

they ask me to remember

but they want me to remember

their memories

and i keep on remembering

mine.

--Lucille Clifton, from How to Carry Water

I fell through a hole in
a church pew yesterday
and landed right
in the thick amber
field of a piece of
          stained glass
I asked a red saint
    who was stargazing
"why must I suffer?"
without looking
at me
     he said
"to know God."
I didn’t like
that answer
so
I crawled through
a mist of royal triangles
and swam across a sea of ovals
   and scaled a pointed cusp
until I found a glowing sinner
and I asked her the
       same question
"why must I suffer?"
she placed her
green hand on my
purple cheek
      and sung
"Because a broken heart
       is easier to share."
suddenly
my hands became
       turquoise doves
and my lips became
     yellow vines
and my feet became
     fat red rubies
and I became radiant
     painted glass of the divine
and I became
   reflected light
and everything
    I touched glowed
and now my broken
illuminated heart
colors the walls
   of every room I walk into

 
          ~ john roedel

Keep my anger from becoming meanness

Keep my sorrow from collapsing into self-pity

Keep my heart soft enough to keep breaking

Keep my anger turned towards justice, not cruelty

Remind me that all of this, every bit of it, is for love

Keep me fiercely kind

--Laura Jean Truman

Improvement

The optometrist says my eyes

are getting better each year.

Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription.

What’s next? The light step I had at six?

All the gray hairs back to brown?

Skin taut as a drum?

My improved eyes and I

walked around town and celebrated.

We took in the letters

of the marquee, the individual leaves

filling out the branches of the sycamore,

an early moon.

So much goes downhill: our joints

wearing out with every mile,

the delicate folds of the eardrum

exhausted from years of listening.

I’m grateful for small victories.

The way the heart still beats time

in the cathedral of the ribs.

And the mind, watching its parade of thoughts

enter and leave, begins to see them

for what they are: jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats

tossing their batons in the air.

--Danusha Laméris, from BONFIRE OPERA © 2020 Danusha Laméris.

Life’s short. Even while

We talk, Time, hateful, runs a mile.

Don’t trust tomorrow’s bough

For fruit. Pluck this, here, now.

--Horace, Odes (translation by James Michie, in the 1964 Penguin edition of Horace's odes.)

BLESSING FOR THE BROKENHEARTED

"There is no remedy for love but to love more."

—Henry David Thoreau

Let us agree

for now

that we will not say

the breaking

makes us stronger

or that it is better

to have this pain

than to have done

without this love.

Let us promise

we will not

tell ourselves

time will heal

the wound,

when every day

our waking

opens it anew.

Perhaps for now

it can be enough

to simply marvel

at the mystery

of how a heart

so broken

can go on beating,

as if it were made

for precisely this—

as if it knows

the only cure for love

is more of it,

as if it sees

the heart’s sole remedy

for breaking

is to love still,

as if it trusts

that its own

persistent pulse

is the rhythm

of a blessing

we cannot

begin to fathom

but will save us

nonetheless.

—Jan Richardson

From The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love--whether we call it friendship or family or romance--is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light.

--Maria Popova writing about James Baldwin https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/01/31/james-baldwin-nothing-personal-love/ 

Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen,  but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.   

 --  Wendell Berry

In a Time of Much Doing

Teach us to sit still.

            —T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday, Part 6”

How soon I seem to have forgotten

how to be still, how to not plan,

how to step out into the day

and let the world itself write

the story of how a morning becomes

an afternoon becomes a night

becomes a woman.

How soon I seem to have forgotten

the value of not doing,

the gift of unscheduling,

the blessing of dipping my toes into the stream

of no time, then wading in full body,

where I remember I am part of an infinite story

at the same time I relearn how fragile it is,

this life.

How soon I forgot I could change it all.

Even now, I could be still again.

I could choose silence.

Even now.

-- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

someday, in your most insecure hour,

when you feel like maybe your life

is some sort of a cosmic mistake,

I want you to close your eyes

and imagine that you are holding

your newborn self in your arms.

feel the heat of your baby skin press up

against your present-day bare chest.

notice how your two heartbeats

take turns keeping the rhythm

between the person you were born

to be and the person who you are now. 

if you listen to those two heartbeats

for long enough

you will hear a voice whispering to you

and you will recognize it

as the Voice of Love.  

it is saying:

"you are born of miracle

   to be a miracle

to someday return to miracle"

my love,

in that moment

look down at your

tiny form

while the voice reminds you of your

~worth

~dignity

~significance

~value

~goodness

feel how the doubt you have

in yourself will start to

soften like butter sitting

in the sun.

this plague of insecurity

has been preying on how exhausted

this modern world makes us all feel.

but - it has one weakness:

  our lives

(however we got here)

are a miracle

and if we try our best to honor

the marvel of our existence

our insecurities will have

no choice but to let

go of our singing throats.

~ no, it won't happen right away

but the more time you spend

with your newborn self

listening to the Voice of Love

you will remember

what a wonder child

of creation you have always been.

~ john roedel

Gentle

I want to be held by each moment

as the arms of branches cradle a nest, 

as the center of that nest, lined with 

the cottony seeds of milkweed, creates 

a cushion for eggs, for the hunger

of hatchlings. I want to make of each 

passing minute a safe place for myself 

and everyone around me, twig by twig 

building a life that shelters others beneath 

my strong wings. I want to seek only 

what feeds us, what softens the world- 

like thistledown, like clipped grass, 

like feathers plucked from the underside 

of my own body.

--James Crews

Self-Care

Some days it feels like a foreign language

I’m asked to practice, with new words

for happiness, work, and love. I’m still learning

how to say: a cup of tea for no reason,

what to call the extra honey I drizzle in,

how to label the relentless urge to do more

and more as poison. And how to translate

the heart’s pounding message when it comes:

enough, enough. This morning, I search for words

to capture the glimmering sun as it lifts

above the mountains, clouds already closing in

as fat droplets of rain darken the deck.

I’m learning to call this stillness self-care too,

just standing here, watching goldfinches

scatter up from around the feeder like pieces

of bright yellow stained-glass, reassembling

in the sheltering arms of a maple.

--James Crews

A Map to the Next World

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

-Joy Harjo