You know I love my peaches…so I am just thrilled by the blossoms covering my tree this season! 🙂
What is thrilling you right now?
Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature –if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you –know that the morning and spring of your life are past.
~Henry David Thoreau
Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day’s performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant? Pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.
~Margaret Fuller
[Note: this iris is one of the beauties blooming in my garden right now. I love the two-toned purples. Nearly everyone who passes by comments on how spectacular these flowers look.]
Today is GameBoy’s birthday. He’s been an never-ending stream of joy since the day he arrived. 🙂
This past year he’s grown more confident, more self-assured. His favorite subject is science and he can discuss nearly any scientific topic at length. He loves games, good food, and helping others. He is a library aide, a Science Olympian, a bike rider, a trash taker-outer, a cat caretaker, a reader of SciAm, and a darn good bear-hugger.
As he chooses classes for next year and looks forward to college (and beyond), he makes this Mom proud. GameBoy is trustworthy, diligent, and mirthful. He makes wise choices. He is thoughtful of others. He is joy.
What can we do but keep on breathing in and out,
modest and willing, and in our places? ~Mary Oliver
Last night in our Study Group, a friend gave an awesome lesson about world religions and what we can glean from various faith traditions to augment our own spiritual paths. She read a passage about the difference between ‘western’ traditions versus ‘eastern’ traditions, specifically noting that western traditions emphasize progression whereas the eastern foster satisfaction with the here and now–“being” in the moment.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot today. I often work so hard to achieve things, yet I crave just sitting in solitude or the time to lose myself in a flower or to lie across my bed with a purring cat beside me. I have so many lofty goals–books to write, places to travel, classes to teach, and so on. But I feel a tension between the ambition it will take to accomplish these goals…and the desire to sit in solitude.
I think for now I am choosing the latter. And tomorrow I will take up the pursuit again. But today, I may just breathe awhile.
The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
I just remembered that John bought me a mochi confection yesterday from the Asian market, and it’s waiting in the fridge for me right now.
I am a lucky girl.
I often just hold my breath as I read through the posts on Persisting Sighs. They are crisp like the snap of clean sheets and lush like smell of rose petals at sunset.
Today Madelyn quoted Neruda and channeled just how I felt earlier today, when I didn’t have the word to express what I saw:
Naked you are as simple as one of your hands,
smooth, terrestrial, tiny, round, transparent,
you have moon~lines, apple paths.
Naked you are as thin as bare wheat,
Naked you are blue like a Cuban night,
there are vines and stars in your hair,
Naked you are enormous and yellow
like summer in a gilded church.
~Pablo Neruda
Meet Fred, one of the little sapling trees that I planted in the burn area on Saturday. Fred was named in honor of my neighbor Fred Rogers. Next year I can’t wait to see how he’s grown, even though I like him just the way he is.
This tree had the most brilliant pink flowers that I’ve ever seen. I’ve never knowingly eaten quince, but anything this lovely has got to taste good.
Just having returned from a weekend retreat in Julian, CA, I can say that this turned out to be a happy trip for all of us. Some highlights:
-Everyone recovered enough from the FluB for us to hightail it out of town early Saturday morning. A lovely drive through the California countryside. Driving past blossoming citrus orchards with the windows down and inhaling deeply.
-Flowers. Everywhere! (including huge clumps of daffodils!)
-Discovering that the food at camp was truly worth gushing over. Local, green, fresh, handmade with herbs and ingenuity. Big salads of mixed greens, golden beet soup, chicken (and chick’n) marsala, crepe-pancakes, and the best sugar cookies, ever!
-Julian apples (and apple pie) and finding a local stand selling avocados 25/$5
-3 games of Ticket to Ride IN A ROW with a worthy opponent. Lost two, won one.
-Marveling at the burn damage from last Fall’s fires. Blackened tree stumps everywhere. Joining a work crew on Saturday to plant trees in the burned areas. Digging deep in the ash-laden soil, making new homes for the small saplings.
-Time for quiet worship in the morning. In small groups and in a large circle with Friends. Sharing my thoughts and experiences. Being open to hearing others’ stories. Realizing the joy that comes from striving together.
-Being away from it all: no cellphones, no wifi. Just a lot of wide open spaces and trees and meadows, and deer, and hawks, and frogs singing at night. And sharing it all with the people that I love. 🙂
It’s been far too long since I’ve shared a poem. So here’s this, a poem for Spring and for Easter chocolate bunnies and for hope:
Doubletake
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home
History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
if there’s fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god nature speaks from the sky.
That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
Seamus Heaney,
The Cure at Troy
