life: acoustic & amplified

a few reasons why…

It must have been the light

It must have been the crowd

It must have been the humidity

It must have been the melting ice cubes

It must have been the falling water

It must have been the greening tree

It must have been the excuses

It must have been the brownie brittle

It must have been the laughing hyenas

It must have been the deep breathing

It must have been the spin cycle

It must have been the old, soft blanket

It must have been the smell of your memory

It must have been my aching bones

It must have been the fading sunset

It must have been the red lipstick

It must have been the pink flamingos

It must have been the honey bee

It must have been the belly ache

It must have been the wrong number

It must have been the heavy frame

It must have been the noise of the fireworks

It must have been the stormy weather

It must have been the smoothest ride

It must have been the smiling eyes

It must have been the perfect fit

It must have been the best martini

It must have been a peaceful morning

It must have been the right combination

It must have been a power walk

It must have been the sweetest taboo

It must have been exceptional

It must have been the arrival at my own front door

It must have been a good, good girl

It must have been my new boundaries

It must have been letting go of the past

It must have been the anticipation of your kiss

It must have been something I can’t put my finger on

It must have been a God-thing

❤️

Amy Lloyd

on a day like today

time after time…

yet this time more so

I lock up suitcases filled with tears.

don’t you think it’s strange,

how a shared pancake can be life changing?

the opposite of the final straw.

a volcanic catalyst for the rising curtain of new beginning,

starting a chain reaction

Life-changes of Biblical proportion.

an all new free-fall dive

into the inner deep.

silence tearing up the very foundations

of my ocean floor

as you walk away.

I am moving very slow.

dizzy and off balance.

Even with this life lived on the extreme edge

of the radical cliffs of self-examination.

Seven days of seismic eruption

create chaotic activity so great

that life will never be the same.

dreams gestating in the souls womb

burst

stillborn

yet ready to scream

in their own voice…

PLEASE…do not let me die…

this truth no longer able to remain hidden

inside its clay container.

Seven days so extraordinary

they have forever changed my world

as I have always known it.

Leading to the uncomfortable uncovering of the bones of my very foundation.

exposing the shadowy villains of my learned weaknesses.

giving me new zeal to heal those naked, shattered places.

keep letting goooo

Keep choosing to be soft,

in spite of the gripping fear.

for now, vulnerability, must be my only guide,

forward

the only way out is through

into the fury of places I have long avoided.

in all of this,

grieving a weeks glimpse of what creation looked like

before the great fall of that one small bite

this aleph-vision-long-awaited life I’ve held in faith that could be.

and so because of

I swear I will no longer hold back anything in this lifetime

but fully, wholly, inhabit my own destiny.

Myself

as

I am

when I fall completely,

head over heels,

in love.

💞

Amy Lloyd

The great cathedral, reliquary of dust,

stones slowly vanishing, not one on another,

glacial, archaeological, yet prayers still hover,

the vast city built on a plan now lost, underfoot,

abandoned, inhabited now by the unknowing,

descendants of descendants, but still dancing,

the shirt you loved longest, tattered like Grecian isles,

a screen, threads gently departing one from another,

the years it recalls, also faded, emptied,

the characters you’ve played, all victory and debacle,

the strength to bend this world to you—all is husk.

Your flesh, your proof, your precious dust—all go.

Let them go, let them be, or not be. The husk gives way.

The miracle, that most is, is in the seed.

You are the growing child within your aging womb,

the love your flesh inhabits, unfolding, unending,

renewing, chrysalis after chrysalis, your tender Lover

working every wound and find and step into a gift.

This is who you are, the river, not the bank,

the flowing, heaven’s breathing, new, and new,

and every moment singing, “Let there be light.”

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light

http://www.unfoldinglight.net

I’ll be a witness

Everybody’s writing a book

Full to the edges with stories of brokenness

smutty sensational stuff

sex, drugs and handguns

prison time and scandals with the local preacher

Im too tired to tango

Coming to terms with my own past

at least at the present moment

resting in the knowledge that I am just enough

tho not that special after all

Which makes me laugh out loud

I no longer carry the world on my shoulders

Atlas has long ago faded from the scene

Holding up my piece of the blue sky

Requires my full attention

I rest in any spare moment I can garner

Ever learning this afresh –

God equals Love!

triangle becomes circle

as does every other shape of the heart

I smile a little as step into this sparkly stage

gloriously lighted by personal security

I simply open my mouth

and sing

😍

Amy Lloyd

all shall be well

The hardest thing about hard times is this: You know you’re not in control anymore. (But ask yourself something: Were you ever?) You have to make big changes before you’re ready or suddenly question what you thought you knew. But it’s possible to turn even the most upsetting situations into opportunities for growth if you can muster enough willingness, trust, faith, patience and surrender. Here’s why these qualities are so essential if we are to transcend our troubles.

Willingness

This is the all-important ingredient for making it through tough times. You must be willing to do what you believe you cannot, and acknowledge what you’ve avoided. Yes, this can be painful, but when you are unwilling to see things—and people—as they are, you can’t deal with the problem, and I can guarantee your situation will be prolonged.

Trust and Faith

Very often people confuse these two principles, but they’re very different. Trust is the belief that you can get through anything, and faith is the energy that grows from that trust, helping you carry on until things get better. You can’t have the latter without the former.

Patience

This is the capacity to accept and tolerate difficulty without anger or sorrow—and it’s your lifeline when you find yourself in the midst of a hard time. In the same way that we are unable to rush the sunrise or the unfolding of the seasons, we can’t force ourselves through a challenging experience in less time than we need to learn, heal or grow. Patience makes our difficulties pass as gently as possible.

Surrender

It’s not about giving up or bowing down. It’s about holding on to the knowledge that something bigger and more powerful than you is at work beneath the surface of your experience, and that it will take you exactly where you need to be. Now, in hard times, surrender is probably the greatest challenge you will encounter because it’s so hard to accept uncertainty. But that, my beloved, is the point. You don’t know what’s to come, but you must know that whatever happens, you will be okay.

Iyanla Vanzant

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/inspiration/increasing-resilience-get-through-hard-times#ixzz5HIRYuiOX

imagination

EVEN A THOUSAND MILES inland you can smell the sea and hear the mewing of gulls if you give thought to it. You can see in your mind’s eye the living faces of people long dead or hear in the mind’s ear the United States Marine Band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” If you work at it, you can smell the smell of autumn leaves burning or taste a chocolate malted. You don’t have to be asleep to dream dreams either. There are those who can come up with dramas laid twenty thousand leagues under the sea or take a little girl through a looking glass. Imagining is perhaps as close as humans get to creating something out of nothing the way God is said to. It is a power that to one degree or another everybody has or can develop, like whistling. Like muscles, it can be strengthened through practice and exercise. Keep at it until you can actually hear your grandfather’s voice, for instance, or feel the rush of hot air when you open the 450-degree oven.

If imagination plays a major role in the creation of literature, it plays a major one also in the appreciation of it. It is essential to read imaginatively as well as to write imaginatively if you want to know what’s really going on. A good novelist helps us do this by stimulating our imaginations—sensory detail is especially useful in this regard, such as the way characters look and dress, the sounds and smells of the places they live and so on—but then we have to do our part. It is especially important to do it in reading the Bible. Be the man who trips over a suitcase of hundred-dollar bills buried in the field he’s plowing if you want to know what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about (Matthew 13:44). Listen to Jesus saying, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28) until you can hear him, if you want to know what faith is all about.

If you want to know what loving your neighbors is all about, look at them with more than just your eyes. The bag lady settling down for the night on the hot-air grating. The two children chirping like birds in the branches of a tree. The bride as she walks down the aisle on her father’s arm. The old man staring into space in the nursing-home TV room. Try to know them for who they are inside their skins. Hear not just the words they speak, but the words they do not speak. Feel what it’s like to be who they are—chirping like a bird because for the moment you are a bird, trying not to wobble as you move slowly into the future with all eyes upon you.

When Jesus said, “All ye that labor and are heavy laden,” he was seeing the rich as well as the poor, the lucky as well as the unlucky, the idle as well as the industrious. He was seeing the bride on her wedding day. He was seeing the old man in front of the TV. He was seeing all of us. The highest work of the imagination is to have eyes like that.

⁃ Frederick Buechner