life: acoustic & amplified

pray a little

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away

the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me

that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe

simpler than I could have begun to find words for

not patient not even waiting no more hidden

than the air itself that became part of me for a while

with every breath and remained with me unnoticed

something that was here unnamed unknown in the days

and the nights not separate from them

not separate from them as they came and were gone

it must have been here neither early nor late then

by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

🙏🏻

Just Now by W S Merwin

Can I be honest?

There were parts of me that didn’t believe

even the parts of me doing the hardest work

the parts of me always acting as though it were possible

the parts of me who couldn’t conceive of the how of it

the parts suspended in the storms fierce wind

hunkered down

eyes closed

Yes, I’ve prayed it…

a thousand times and counting

Lord I believe –

Help my unbelief!

🙏🏻

Amy Lloyd

3 photos by Timothy Siebold Branford Supply Ponds

Look to this day:

For it is life, the very life of life.

In its brief course

Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.

The bliss of growth,

The glory of action,

The splendour of achievement

Are but experiences of time.

For yesterday is but a dream

And tomorrow is only a vision;

And today well-lived, makes

Yesterday a dream of happiness

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well therefore to this day;

Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

—

Look To This Day by Kalidasa

https://youtu.be/yrn6Wyhsoiw

Hey there, you’re not alone

– Costco

The pain, the problem, the struggle,
the wound, the weakness, the “disability”—
don’t let it go until you have found the blessing.

The thing you hate:
your hate is a way of hanging on—
because it still has something for you,
a new birth it is trying to give you.

The angel is usually not out there,

but within.

(Remember you’re not wrestling with tragedy,

you’re wrestling with God.

Though every loss is a lesson,

God does not assign pedagogical tragedy.)

The awful event, the terrible loss,

the insult or injustice you’ve suffered,

is not likely a blessing,

but there is one there.

Watch how you resist it,

and learn instead.

Don’t seek the fight; seek the blessing.

You can’t forget, move on, grow up,

you can’t get wise

until you have sought and gotten the blessing.

In that moment your suffering will re-name you

and walk away.

Let the crowd’s hunger be an opening for grace

and the loaves and fish will multiply.

Don’t let go

till you get the blessing.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

 

lovely day

Sometimes when all the world seems gray and dun

And nothing beautiful, a voice will cry,

“Look out, look out! Angels are drawing nigh!”

Then my slow burdens leave me, one by one,

And swiftly does my heart arise and run

Even like a child, while loveliness goes by—

And common folk seem children of the sky,

And common things seem shapèd of the sun.

Oh, pitiful! that I who love them, must

So soon perceive their shining garments fade!

And slowly, slowly, from my eyes of trust

Their flaming banners sink into a shade!

While this earth’s sunshine seems the golden dust

Slow settling from that radiant cavalcade.

🌕

While Loveliness Goes by Anna Hempstead Branch

there is wonder

in the shape of things

much more than simple function in the form

magnificence in patterns

grace in the traced template

outlining perfection

or a the very least,

mind-boggling excellence

there is magic in design

simply exquisite how I love these things so much

my mind conjures up some of my time-lapsed favorites:

• cotton candy clouds reorganizing in mid air

🔹ferns unfolding into majestic fans for kingly trees

🔸leaves dancing to the grounded drum beats of rain

♦️random pieces of life naturally shaped into hearts

🔹a thick glass 6 oz coke bottle, icy cold, being pulled from the clanging machine

🔸cupcakes with perfect frosting being deconstructed one finger swipe at a time

♦️the outline of a baby cheek sleeping on the shoulder of the young man in front of you

🔹Rama Desi’s yellow house, complete with intricately drawn chalk sidewalk dragons

🔸the most perfect button I’ve ever seen on a belly

 

my list must be a million miles long…
ever growing, changing, being continued
as my life changes with each breath I take

the fingers of my imagination slowly, lovingly exploring
touching each one…

…lingering on you…

my mind takes me into other worlds
cinema of beautiful shapes
wealth of living awareness
well beyond limits
the riches of the mystic
always ready whenever we pause for a moment
the details are the delight
we share these visions with each other
(sometimes calling them poems)
these words of this and that
we scribe to describe
to be seen and discovered
our selves
our beautiful universes
our homes
our neighbors
our friends
our families
our lovers
each lingering like sweet honey on the tongue
then continuing on at their own perfect pace

❤

Amy Lloyd

 

 

a soft place

There is nothing too good to be true. Nothing can be withheld by those who persevere.

– j. j. Dewey

There is the question

of bearing witness, of being yourself seen

by yourself, & seen clearly, cleanly,

without weapon or bible in hand;

as this was the wish,

the sturdy & not-so-secret wish

of those who named us—

our parents wanted us to be

known to ourselves without confusion:

without judgment,

sans suffering. Never force it,

they said, always find it.

OK, strictly speaking, that’s not entirely true.

My particular, sole, insistent, moody mother & father

probably never thought much about it at all.

Those two anxious citizens,

they were never exemplars of patience.

The weightlessness of detachment & acceptance

as I think of it now

would have frightened them—

for good reason.

If you could see these words

I’m speaking to you tonight printed on a page

as typeface & magnified x 500

you would feel just how ragged & coarse

they really are, heavy.

Well, playing the part of a butterfly

must be tiring, right?

I’m happier being the old ox, right?

On some plane of existence

these two scraps are all my news:

where the mess is

that’s where my heart is.

❤️💔❤️

Strictly Speaking by David Rivard

Sometimes, I write something that becomes more true for me with time. The last few days I’ve been unable to walk more than a few steps (happily my apartment is small enough that that gets me where I need to go 🙂 ) Most of the pain is in my back- which is unusual for me, and this piece made me wonder: What am I carrying that could be set down at the side of the road? Sometimes we carry things- old hurts or responsibilities- out of habit. We’ve forgotten we’re carrying them. They’ve started to feel like part of our being. But they aren’t- and maybe, sometimes, pain in the body can remind us of what we are carrying that no longer serves us or helps us offer who we are to the world. Going to sit. . . .well, okay. . . maybe lie down on the floor with that today.

-Oriah

Blessed be… art series by Brianna Saussy

Everyone needs a witness – someone to testify you were really here and you really tried, someone to witness your wounds and believe in your worth, someone to say even your crazy can’t stop you from being crazy loved. Everyone needs a witness who will stand and not hold you back because if we all only lived safe, no one would ever get saved.

Everyone needs a witness — and I’ll be yours.

You don’t become a parent by bearing a child. You become a parent by bearing witness to their life.

I swallow hard and memorize them.

the witness willing to always bear the weight of all their glory.

– Ann Voskamp

photo sources found on pinterest/al513

yes or no

Cowardice asks the question – is it safe? Expediency asks the question – is it politic? Vanity asks the question – is it popular? But conscience asks the question – is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.

– Dr. King

I was showing

you something

about love,

something

I had learned

a long time

ago and we

were talking

about trust

and asking to

be shown

what love is and

wanting to know

what our

highest good is

and I said,

“our highest good

is to trust

the love

that we are

and to let

each other

find love

by knowing

that love

cannot be

controlled,

remembering

that love

is all you

need to

hold,

that what is deep

and true

in our own hearts

is all that we

can trust.”

there was silence,

our eyes met,

and I saw

me

there,

and I saw

you there,

and there

was also

something

else,

something else

there

too sacred

to be

spoken.

💞

scott lockhart

earth 2017

<<<<<<<
ritual life is one of constant choices. One of the most important choices is the choice of people with whom we develop close intimate relationships. We have only a limited amount of time in our lives. With whom do we spend it and how?…

As people who trust in God’s love, we must have the courage and the confidence to say to someone through whom God’s love becomes visible to us: ‘I would like to get to know you, I would like to spend time with you, I would like to develop a friendship with you. What about you?’

There will be no’s, there will be pain of rejection. But when we determine to avoid all no’s and all rejections, we will never create the mileau where we can grow stronger and deepen in love. God became human for us to make divine love tangible. That is what incarnation is all about. That incarnation not only happened long ago, but it continues to happen for those who trust that God will give us the friends we need. But the choice is ours!”

❤️

#HenriNouwen HERE AND NOW

http://www.henrinouwen.org

UNCONDITIONAL

love is the invisible, dream-like land-fall where we never fully come ashore. Unconditional love is a central human aspiration exactly because it is almost impossible to fulfill. We are mortal creatures of living and dying and how we love and what we love is conditional upon where we stand in the drama and the seasonality of that living and dying.

Love may be sanctified and ennobled by its commitment to the unconditional horizon of perfection, but what makes love real in the human world seems to be our moving, struggling conversation with that wanted horizon rather than the actual arrival. The hope for, or the declaration of a purely spiritual, unconditional love is more often a coded desire for immunity and safety, an attempt to forgo the trials of vulnerability, powerlessness and the exquisite pain to which we apprentice ourselves in a relationship, a marriage, in raising children, in a work we love and desire.

The hope for unconditional love is the hope for a different life than the one we have been given. Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world. The true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love of a child, a partner, a work, or a road we have to take against all the odds.

Our roads and journeys of love are always lived through beautiful humiliations, through disappointments, and through forms of imprisonment: of our own or another’s strange behavior or simply subject to the seasonality of the world; the arriving weather of existence always blowing through once stable lives and many times, blowing us apart.

Unconditional love is the beautiful hoped for impossibility, and yet we could not fully understand the nature of our helplessness without looking through the lens of that hoped -for perfection. We are creatures who do not get to choose between what we want and what is wanted of us, and we seem to embody the full vulnerabilities of love only when we dwell at the moving frontier between this wanting and being wanted.

The invitation is made to us every day whether we desire it or no, to enter a deeply human world of robust vulnerability, shot through with a sometimes joyful, more often difficult helplessness; to risk ourselves in the conditional world in which we live and to accept that there is no possible path we can follow where we will be untouched by the heartbreak, the difficulties and the joys that move us and move through us. Conditional or unconditional, the only path possible seems to be in giving our self unconditionally to the conditionality of each overwhelming, disturbing and rewarding, guise of love

…

‘UNCONDITIONAL’

In ‘CONSOLATIONS’:

The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

© David Whyte & Many Rivers Press 2015

There will come moments where you will have the choice to say yes or say no to love. There will be moments where you hesitate and even wrestle with choosing love. Love is not easy. Vulnerability is not easy. Love will always be risky. I pray you and I will choose love. Over and over and over. Keep softening. Keep opening our hearts. Keep choosing love.

– Amy Lloyd

any given Wednesday

If there is a day you have eaten until you were full; if there is a time of joy you can recall; if you have escaped even once the clutches of death – if you can remember one or all of the above, then you have something to be grateful for.

– Iyanla Vanzant

Feeling the grateful all over! 💞

courage to choose

And so traverses, gun in hand, the creek.

We on the other side waiting dreamily

as for a wave. The head of the tree

is heavy. The pears are not ripe.

I do not dare look up, seeing as

the day has splurged against my face

and you are on the other side

where the grid breaks into tiny oracular

tiles, wafer thin, distorted, pale.

The huge sound is mechanical, not

expressionistic: things

into other things, exploding.

The serial furthers.

Were you wearing a sombrero or

just a hood to keep hot chords

from your skin? Serial, as in many

tunes, many kills, weeping

additions and accumulating, dry

remainders; the cost of endurance.

👨🏻‍🌾

Of This by Ann Lauterbach

Let’s take a better look

beyond a story book

And learn our souls are all we own

before we turn to stone

Let’s go to sleep with clearer heads

and hearts too big to fit our beds

And maybe we won’t feel so alone

before we turn to stone

And if you wait for someone else’s hand,

(If you wait for someone else’s hand)

Then you will surely fall down

(If you wait for someone else’s hand)

And if you wait for someone else’s hand,

(If you wait for someone else)

You’ll fall, you’ll fall

I know that I am nothing new

There’s so much more than me and you

But brother, how we must atone

before we turn to stone

And brother, how we must atone

before we turn to stone

truth is cavalier

life jauntily goes on

with or without me

wisps of time remaining

whiskers and sweat are a rough lifestyle choice

ashes and rust make a way of adhering to ancient venetian plaster

scraping razors uncover the smooth behind the blood red

layers of years, of jobs, of actions done wrong

Smokey two-chains of battle-scars and emphysema

gravelly voices fighting their way through fear

with guilt lurking in every corner

deflecting laughter leveled at consistent foolishness and aggravation

Careless broken pieces of windowed ledges

Flash fires suddenly stormy

Powder kegs are a mile a minute

better walk in the middle of the street in the early morning hours

It’s hard to change directions when all you know are guilty pleasures

looking for moments of light breaking through

–

Is that a cat on his neck?

Yuuup…

–

yes sir-y-bob, it ALWAYS is what it is…

even after the third time asking the question to yourself…

everything will be ok in the end…

never. never. never. quit. (WC)

Lightning 13 miles from thunder moving closer with that crazy-eyed sky

hearts are, as usual, our least/most vulnerable spot

even after the eclipse shows us how to start over

step by step…

Prize fighters never forget how to clench fists

hard getting harder with each blow

unless something new is chosen

Practical life changers have seen some business

“You gotta get up early in the morning to try to get me…

and all you’ll get is tired”

I was here for a minute

then flew into the deep blue yonder

while you play games you’re sure to win

as you are the only competitor

somehow my life has completely changed

in ways beyond this moment of knowing

beyond the lingering smell of cigars I can’t outrun

destiny takes no prisoners

freedom rides the hot delta winds

love always wins no matter the shape it takes

suddenly the simplest spoken truth shifts all perspective of the weeks behind

Changing nothing and everything simultaneously

I breathe free released from my illusive, nagging, self doubt and confusion

no more trickery allowed in my personal realm

I can see things clearly

there in the clouds of heaven

Atlas finally takes the world off his shoulders for good

🌹😘

Amy Lloyd

“Lord, protect our decisions, because decisions are prayers

Give us the courage to choose between one road and another.

May our YES always be a YES and our NO always be a NO.

Once we have chosen our road, may we never look back nor allow our soul to be eaten away by remorse.

💞

― Paulo Coelho, Like the Flowing River

 

❤
Atlas photos via pinterest / al513

true colors

Rain decays dawn—

everything in the yard

leaning, beaded, broken in.

A lucid dream

the weather

assembles; a pain particular

as light seeping

into an alley

narrowed by overgrowth.

To articulate what slips

the instant

speech moves

to apprehend it.

Cinder blocks stacked

by a metal shed door

totem-like

in haze

of evaporated rain.

🍂

Early Fall by Joseph Massey

And it begins to happen and nothing could be truer than what Pascal said: “Instead of complaining that God had hidden himself, you will give Him thanks for having revealed so much of Himself.”

The darkness ebbs.

The shadows dim –

and all the trees and all the thankful, they ignite, seeing and believing the true colours of now.

– Ann Voskamp

🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂

we can be so blinded

by what we think we want

that we fail to see what we have

keeping our hands, eyes, hearts closed

to what’s tattooed all over the world

engraved into our hands

sculpted within us

ringing as a clear bell

the soul continually tries to wake us

we refuse to see

we live angry

because God does not obey our wishes

fails to bow to our demands

(God never lives up to our standards)

our words can be weapons

used in machine gun fashion

to kill those in our line of fire

usually those we love the most

bleed the loudest red

Joy is different than laughter

Peace only comes through recognition of our place in the world

the opening of clenched fists

Fall air cleans the green off the leaves

to become

the true colors of holy

surrendering with songs of glory

the surprising truth of death

which brings in next years harvest

we are all connected

we are all in season

🍁

Amy Lloyd

There’s a dip in the stone step

in the threshold of the old cathedral,

worn where thousands of pilgrims have stepped

as they entered the darkness to pray.
❤

Even in the old country church

the railing is rubbed bare

where the faithful have grasped,

have leaned, have hoped.
❤

There is a worn spot

at the threshold of your heart

where God has entered the silence

over and over, to pray and gaze at your altar.

You don’t have to hear the words.

You don’t have to understand.

Just step on the threshold,

touch the railing, and you know.

__
__________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net

rabbit. rabbit. rabbit.

Inside her pulses something huge, something full of longing, something unafraid.

– cassy