life: acoustic & amplified

poetry, quotes & thoughts about life

Archive for the category “Change”

30 Sep 2015

higher ground 

 

    
  

 

            It’s an interesting

custom, involving such in-

            visible items as the food

that’s not on the table, the clothes

            that are not on the back

the radio whose only music

            is silence. Doing without

is a great protector of reputations

            since all places one cannot go

are fabulous, and only the rare and

            enlightened plowman in his field

or on his mountain does not overrate

            what he does not or cannot have.

Saluting through their windows

            of cathedral glass those restaurants

we must not enter (unless like

            burglars we become subject to

arrest) we greet with our twinkling

            eyes the faces of others who do

without, the lady with the

            fishing pole and the man who looks

amused to have discovered on a walk

            another piece of firewood.

🔹

Doing Without by David Ray

   
photos found on http://www.pinterest.com

Listen to Sara Bareilles sing Between the Lines http://youtu.be/s8e45WHIduM

Posted in action, attitude, awareness, beloved, Blessing, Change, Choice, commitment, connection, courage, determination, Faith, Glory, Gratitude, Growth, healing, Letting Go, Life, Love, perceptions, Reflection, Relationships, soul and spirit, strength, Trust, truth, Uncategorized, www.pinterest.com | Leave a comment
29 Sep 2015

roots

You don’t have to sit with white linen on, light your tree scented candles and channel Buddha. There doesn’t have to be a “Dream Big” journal or a fairy involved. Just slow yourself down a few times a day and check in. Why am I so overwhelmed? Why am I rushing? Why am I so angry?       – Tancie Leroux

 

 A FRIEND OF mine dreamed that he was standing in an open place out under the sky, and there was a woman also standing there dressed in some coarse material like burlap. He could not see her face distinctly, but the impression that he had was that she was beautiful, and he went up to her and asked her a question. This friend of mine described himself to me once as a believing unbeliever, and the question that he asked her was the same one that Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, only he did not ask it the way you can imagine Pilate did — urbanely, with his eyes narrowed—but instead he asked it with great urgency as if his life depended on the answer, as perhaps it did. He went up to the woman in his dream and asked, “What is the truth?” Then he reached out for her hand, and she took it. Only instead of a hand, she had the claw of a bird, and as she answered his question, she grasped his hand so tightly in that claw that the pain was almost unendurable and prevented him from hearing her answer. So again he asked her, “What is the truth?” and again she pressed his hand, and again the pain drowned out her words. And then once more, a third time, and once more the terrible pain and behind it the answer that he could not hear. And the dream ended. What is the truth for the man who believes and cannot believe that there is a truth beyond all truths, to know which is to be himself made whole and true?
🔹

-Frederick Buechner Originally published in The Hungering Dark

 

 Out of perfection nothing can be made.
Every process involves breaking something up.

The earth must be broken to bring forth life.

If the seed does not die, there is no plant.

Bread results from the death of wheat.

Life lives on lives.

Our own life lives on the acts of other people.

If you are lifeworthy,

you can take it.

🔹

  – Joseph Campbell- Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

 

photos on www.pinterest.com 

Posted in attitude, awareness, beloved, Change, Choice, courage, grace, Gratitude, healing, Letting Go, Miracles | Leave a comment
28 Sep 2015

final word

  
There, don’t you hear it too?

Something is calling, although

The day is blank and gray.
The eye fastened on nothing,

The ear undistracted

And we with nothing to say.
But still that sense of calling,

Of something seeking attention

Beyond our consciousness.
That voice in voiceless things

When they cease to be themselves,

Losing their choice and purpose.
Joining the indiscriminate

Otherness which surrounds us

At our own times of withdrawal.
It is then that the world calls us

As if to reinterpret

Or to reconfigure.
Whose is this voice? A god’s?

Surely not. It seems

To be the voice of duty
That speaks of origins

And of relationships

Between things grown apart.
And I remember the muezzin

Singing every morning

Raptly, as if for himself.
Singing in the dark hour

At a distance, over all,

And yet outside our door.
His practised lilt spoke more

Of the puzzles of night than of

The determinations of morning.
As though the light had still

To be charmed into being

And each day a reward.
The voice is much like his,

A commanding meditation

Rising from the blankness.
Of a sleeping senselessness,

Thoughtful, improbable,

But stirring us to beauty.
And like his, the voice

Links us for a while

In its reiterations
Then ends abruptly, as if

Distracted by something else

Of no great importance.

🔹

Calling by John Fuller

   
 photos found @ www.pinterest.com

Posted in awareness, Change, Choice, connection, determination, find art at pinterest, Letting Go, Love, Patience, quiet, Relationships | Leave a comment
26 Sep 2015

decisions  

 

there is a turning point 

in every life

a point of decision 

to overcome

or succumb 

a point of taking responsibility 

for your life

or not

there’s also a point 

of no return

where you draw a deep breath

and all you have chosen up to this point,

good or bad

comes out to meet you 

AL

  

Posted in attitude, awareness, Change, Choice, find art at pinterest, Life, Love, Reflection, soul and spirit, strength, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
20 Sep 2015

September’s Still Remembering

 

 This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight; 
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves; 

The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves, 

And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows. 

Under a tree in the park, 

Two little boys, lying flat on their faces, 

Were carefully gathering red berries 

To put in a pasteboard box. 

Some day there will be no war, 

Then I shall take out this afternoon 

And turn it in my fingers, 

And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate, 

And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves. 

To-day I can only gather it 

And put it into my lunch-box, 

For I have time for nothing 

But the endeavour to balance myself 

Upon a broken world. 

🙏🏻

September, 1918 by Amy Lowell

   
Listen to September Grass by James Taylor http://youtu.be/1lMJyn1YtcA

❤️

Photos found at www.pinterest.com

 

 Peace in Our Hands by Valerie Lorimer – find her artwork on Etsy

Posted in awareness, beauty, Change, Choice, compassion, connection, Encouragement, Faith, Freedom, Life, Love, Peace, Seasons, soul and spirit, touch | Leave a comment
19 Sep 2015

giving thanks 

 

Can I believe being thankful in all circumstances is important because it acknowledges that during the dark times of change, God is still covering me with His hand?

🔹

   – Kristen Strong @ A Holy Experience

http://www.aholyexperience.com/2015/09/when-youre-desperate-to-find-the-light-when-there-are-no-windows/

  
facebook/follow the art  

  
  When we descend all the way down to the bottom of loss, and dwell patiently, with an open heart, in the darkness and pain, we can bring back up with us the sweetness of life and the exhilaration of inner growth. When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self – the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey.

– Elizabeth Lesser

 

 bottom 2 photos found at www.pinterest.com

Posted in attitude, awareness, beauty, Change, Choice, connection, courage, dark, Grieving, Growth, healing, Hope, Life, light, Love, Reflection | Leave a comment
17 Sep 2015

free to go… 

Listen to Diana Ross sing Do You Know Where You’re Going To? http://youtu.be/gsA-Xc6gWDE

  

  
 

  

  

photo and sources found @ www.pinterest.com 

Posted in action, Adventure, attitude, awareness, Becoming Yourself, Change, Choice, connection, courage, Freedom, Letting Go, Life, Love, soul and spirit, Trust | Leave a comment
17 Sep 2015

what love looks like 

   
 Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word love, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.

          -Maya Angelou

   
  There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.   I John 4:18

top photo by Fisherman Dan @ Branford, CT

other photos found on facebook

💞

It’s hard to love someone really,

especially the annoying, the arrogant, the cruel—

because I want to be separate from them.

I don’t want to be one with them,

soiled by their sin, associated with their dirt.

I want to push their boat off in a good direction

but not be in their boat.

But to love someone 

is to cease judging the cruel as more cruel than I.

To love someone is to go to heaven or hell with them,

to put my arm around them and go together.

To lay aside my private little self

and be part of our divine oneness.
God leaves the perfect halls of heaven

to be one of us, to be us,

mucked in our grime, weak as the weakest of us,

blamed with our worst, frail, faulty and failed.

It’s not the gracious, condescending gesture 

to the needy that makes it love;

it’s the absence of distance, the common wound,

it’s the arm around one, walking the way with one,

the resurrecting grace of giving your whole self away,

changing someone’s life by giving them yours.

It’s hard to love really because you have to die.

You disappear. You stop being separate,

stop being a little “one” so far from the “other,”

and be One. Less than that is zero.
But it’s easy to love, really,

when finally in our failure we give up

and throw away our pretensions of virtue,

and dump out the cardboard box 

of our our whole useless heart and all its little pieces,

and, becoming so emptied… wait, 

and God fills us with God’s only love

that flows through us without our having to bother

with the work of getting in its way. 
It’s hard to love really, 

until we empty out

and shine. 

__________________ 

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light

http://www.unfoldinglight.net

Posted in attitude, awareness, beauty, Becoming Yourself, beloved, Change, Choice, determination, Faith, Freedom, friendship, intimacy, Letting Go, Life, Love, People, Relationships, Trust, truth | Leave a comment
15 Sep 2015

as in poetry, so in life

Poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought — Michel Leiris 

Night Owl Poetry

 

poem found on facebook/parker palmer
Nature is our greatest teacher. Storms are part of life. Change is good…
 

Posted in attitude, awareness, beauty, Becoming Yourself, Beginning, Blessing, Change, Choice, determination, healing, Letting Go, Life, mystery, nature, Seasons | Leave a comment
08 Sep 2015

hello, again! 

 

A few weeks ago I took a break. I truly had no idea if I would return here. I was ok with that – it’s a lovely body of work. 

I enjoyed my break, a few times I thought about it…mainly I didn’t….

Over the past three or four days I keep getting a recurring message, ‘speak to the dry bones’. (Haven’t totally worked that out yet…in fact, I’m at sea on it – I welcome any thoughts on it…) 

Then, yesterday, I got the message in my soul…time to start again – return and build – and so, here I am. Not really sure where it’s going to go…feels a lot different from my first post 4+ years ago. There are lots of new things going on in my life. Lots of things being moved and removed. Interesting times for me, hard things, as always, still, there is the same, consistent hand of faith holding me, guiding me, urging me on, keeping me on the path of love, joy and peace. The world is a hard, broken place to live in, but deep inside each of us lives the key to overcome the world. I believe that completely. 

Thank you for reading my words. Thank you for being a part of my life. Thank you for understanding, or even mis-understanding my thoughts. It’s all good stuff! 

Welcome to my adventure!

Love and kisses, 

Amy

 

 Wisdom cries out in the street;

                  at the busiest corner she raises her voice:

         “I will pour out my thoughts to you.”

                  —Proverbs 1.20, 21, 23

I listen.

Amid the clatter and chatter

of my fears and fantasies,

the rattle and traffic of this world

the trip wire pitch, the push,

the drive for the deal

to buy me and sell me—
I listen to your soft voice

humming beneath worry and duty,

steady, its ocean of silence,

its moon of light,
the nearest murmur,

no argument, no decree,

no foreign words, no hard words,

no words,

but wind in grass,

saying all I need to know, 
flowing water,

a river poured out in me

to drink, to bathe,

to lie in and float

to your sea. 

__________________ 

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light

http://www.unfoldinglight.net

 

listen to Neil Diamond sing Hello Again http://youtu.be/ZnbMHkiIGwk 
Photo sources found at www.pinterest.com

Posted in Adventure, attitude, awareness, Becoming Yourself, Beginning, beloved, Change, Choice, community, Encouragement, find art at pinterest, Joy, Life, Love, Peace, voice | Leave a comment

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