life: acoustic & amplified

at the end of the year

As this year draws to its end,

We give thanks for the gifts it brought

And how they become inlaid within

Where neither time nor tide can touch them.

Days when beloved faces shone brighter

With light from beyond themselves;

And from the granite of some secret sorrow

A stream of buried tears loosened.

We bless this year for all we learned,

For all we loved and lost

And for the quiet way it brought us

Nearer to our invisible destination.

John O’Donohue

Excerpt from, ‘At the End of the Year’

Mark Nepo tells us to,

‘put down what doesn’t work –

so that we can find what is sacred’.

🎄

What worked so well yesterday,

may not work today.

We wear out our structures of known truth,

the frameworks of what we use for living,

for healing.

Let them go,

trust in the new architecture –

modern,

with our personal, classic twist.

We are always becoming.

Watch for the signs of structural failure,

build the new bridge,

delight in this magnificent design,

those amazing cranes hanging in the water,

strong, foundational columns

rising from deep within the waters,

creating the new skyline of your life,

welcome this new place of crossing.

It can handle rush hour,

or heavy foot-traffic.

Continue the build,

always creating with the future in mind,

before the old fully implodes underneath our feet.

🏗

AL

Let mystery have its place in you;

do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination,

but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring,

and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird;

keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God.

Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it.

If you are conscious of something new—thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being—

do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it;

let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten,

hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness.

Henri Frederic Amiel