I’m not asking for permission
tho I thank you for your good intentions in the giving
I surrender to
life
voice
purpose
passion
healing
love
music
breath
spirit
joy
peace
you do what you want
with, or without, permission,
I won’t mind
just remember:
I won’t go down without a fight
da da da dada
da da da dada
da da da dada da da da da…
just play your funky music
and keep on dancing
💞
AL
(with a little inspiration from my friends)
Listen to Serenity Fisher sing Rose Red
Hanging on by the proverbial thread
heart hungry for more
feeling ready
to break
properly
crash and burn to ashes
Am I the only one
on the edge of sideways
trying to walk a straight line
as that slight right turn
ends up being a hard right circle
where I end up facing myself
in an old west gun-slinger shoot the lights out,
death of my dreams
duel?
Am I the only one?
I hold my heart in my hands tenderly
hoping my repairs hold
that it won’t give way
and slide through my fingers
like sand on a summer day
which can never hold a shape
longer than when the next high tide
washes it away
AL
photos found on http://www.pinterest.com
Maybe when you open the sacred book
the little bits of truth come flying out
like birds and if you’re lucky
one of them lands in the tree of you.
It doesn’t have much to do with
penetrating the world with your wisdom,
just being there waiting.
Maybe when you open the book
they all hold very very still
like frogs in the pond
and you have to be as still as they
to see one of them move.
They are not hiding, just waiting.
Maybe you are the book
and none of the birds in you are caged
and none of them ever fly away.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
photos found on facebook
Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other
lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.
When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it
touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.
I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,
the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,
becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.
I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.
💞
The Second Music by Annie Lighthart
God is my presence of mind
My anger
My passion
My resistance
God is my breathe
My movement
My flow
God is my present circumstance
My living
My future
My past
God is my water
My fire
My earth
My loving
My glory
My holy
God is my music
My melody
My harmony
My song
🎼
AL
So, I’ve been thinking about discipline- you know, the thing we think we need to find if we are going to do the things we know are good for us (like eating well, exercise, daily meditation etc.) I can clamp down with my will and pick up those aspirations daily- but at times it just feels like endless work, and sooner or later I run out of steam.
So lately, I’ve been trying something different. Instead of berating myself and insisting that today (or tomorrow) I will dig deep and find the necessary discipline, I’ve been thinking about giving myself gifts.
As in- today, I’m giving myself the gift of taking a walk in the autumn leaves, of taking my time in prayer and meditation, of making a wonderful stew for dinner. If I can keep my attitude in the range of doing something kind for myself (as opposed to doing something I think I “should” do) not only is it easier to create good self-care, it becomes about receiving that care with gratitude.
And that’s just a more enjoyable way to receive the gift of this day.
~Oriah
Halloween was confusing. All my life my parents said, ‘Never take candy from strangers.’ And then they dressed me up and said, ‘Go beg for it.’ I didn’t know what to do! I’d knock on people’s doors and go, ‘Trick or treat.’ ‘No thank you.’
– Rita Rudner
You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.
Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.
This rebus —slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life—
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.
As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.
The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.
How can I enter this question the clay has asked?
🔹
Rebus by Jane Hirshfield
The lion still roars
I walk in grief
On the purple beach
the grey-green water
meeting the sky
Into infinity
the world unending
I sit on driftwood
Fascinatingly carved by water
Into pieces of art
and shapes that look like
cattle skulls in the desert
I cry as I pick up rocks
Why do i grieve such simple things?
Those precious shells
I spent hours snorkeling for
In 1985
You polished them
til they were smooth as silk
So beautiful
I loved everything about them
and that memory they held
Back When the world was still
A mystery
And I knew nothing about hardship
Loss or pain
I thought love and life were simple
That you wanted me to be happy
That you loved me
That we would build a family together
I kept those shells in a special jar
Would let the kids play with them
For a special treat
I loved their delight in them
As they played for hours
sorting the colors and shapes
Loving the story of us at the start
I Kept them close to me
Through all the losses
Then they were gone
lost to me forever
way after my innocence
but somehow they took
some shred I was holding on to
Some secret part of me and you
that was still beautiful
As I picked up small beautiful rocks
today at the beach
They reminded me
and it all returned
all the losses
all the pain
What you chose
The choices I was forced to make
The price of gaining my soul
The cost of winning my freedom
I cry so deeply
Right to the core
such intense love
for the wounded heart
carried in small pieces
of the world
connecting all the pain
and love together
Bittersweet grief
Bittersweet love
Exquisite pain
Exquisite joy
Will I ever find love that understands this?
Will I ever share this same heart as one?
Will I ever make it home?
Will I ever make it?
Will I ever?
Will I?
Will?
💙
AL
photos found at http://www.pinterest.com
AWAKEN TO THE INVITATION
As the density of night gives way to the bright song of the dawn, so your soul continually coaxes you to give way to the light and awaken. Longing is the voice of your soul, it constantly calls you to be fully present in your life: to live to the full the one life given to you. Rilke said to the young poet, “Live everything.” You are here on earth now, yet you forget so easily. You traveled a great distance to get here. The dream of your life has been dreamed from eternity. You belong within a great embrace that urges you to have the courage to honor the immensity that sleeps in your heart. When you learn to listen to and trust the wisdom of your soul’s longing, you will awaken to the invitation of graced belonging that inhabits the generous depths of your destiny. You will become aware of the miracle of presence within and around you.
– John O’Donohue
Like this ocean
Needs the moon
Like my coffee
Needs the cream
Like my music
Bleeds dark blue
So do I need you
Like the body
Water craves
Like the frugal
Money save
Like the artist
Must create
So do I need you
I need you
like breathe
Like food
Like rain
I need you
Right now
And every day
Like the waves
Must kiss the shore
So do I need you
Always
So do I need you
🔹
AL
🔹
photos found at www.pinterest.com
The mouth of the river may be beautiful.
It doesn’t remember the womb of its beginning.
It doesn’t look back to where it’s been
or wonder who ahead of it polished the rough stones.
It is following the way
in its fullness,
now like satin,
now cresting,
waters meeting, kindred
to travel gathered together,
all knowing it flows
one way, shining or in shadows.
And me, the animal
I ride wants to drive forward,
its longing not always my own,
overrunning its banks and bounds,
edgeless, spilling along the way
because, as I forget,
it knows everything
is before it.
🔹
Journey by Linda Hogan
It’s a beautiful, perfect day
Warm, with a shadow of cool
makes me know fall is coming
I do love me some October
I drove to Rocky Hill
to sing
spent way too much money
on not much of anything
coffee
filling up with gas
ordered a book for 46$
from Chenè in Africa,
Re-Authoring the World:
story narrative
changing our perceptions
changing our world
things are changing for me
it is time for me to begin again
time for readjusting the flow
time to take another step
time to make my choices
from a place of strength
from a place of determination
Freedom belongs to those who use it
🔹
AL
🔹
you think you have time…
🔹
listen to Amy Grant & Vince Gill sing House of Love
2 bottom photos found at http://www.pinterest.com
🔹
Nothing has to happen immediately, this minute, or right now. It’s okay to pause for just a moment. Just take a breath. Then go quietly inside. Ask Life Itself to lead you to your best outcome. There’s nothing you have to do, really, except get out of your own way. — Neale Donald Walsch
Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love even more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant.
#HenriNouwen THE INNER VOICE OF LOVE
http://wp.henrinouwen.org/rgroup_blog/
HEARTBREAK is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight. Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is our indication of sincerity: in a love relationship, in a work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete’s quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.
Heartbreak is inescapable; yet we use the word as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will also keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way…
David Whyte
Live today. Remove all blame from your vocabulary. Catch yourself when you find yourself using your past history as a reason for your failure to act today, and instead say, “I am free now to detach myself from what used to be”. – Dr Wayne Dyer
what is being responsible, truly?
what horrors do we shackle ourselves to in the name of responsibility?
how do we break the chains of control
of manipulation
of tradition
of condition
of religion?
and follow the the truth of our hearts
of being in control
of only our own lives
of our own destinies
of our souls true callings?
this is not about shirking our responsibility
or being selfish
or leaving people in the lurch
this is about coming from a place within
of being
of awareness
of beloved
of freedom
of disciplined action
seeing below the lying distractions so ready to keep us deluded
then allowing all things to flow from us
to the ones we love
it’s the only way to truly live responsibly
in fact, it’s the only way to truly live
🔹
AL
photos found on facebook
How will you know your real friends? Pain is as dear to them as life. A friend is like gold. Trouble is like fire. Pure gold delights in the fire. ~ Rumi
And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know
pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily
miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons
that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen,
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within
you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy
in silence and tranquility:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by
the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has
been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has
moistened with His own sacred tears.
– Kahlil Gibran: On Pain
JOY
is a form of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, song, music in the kitchen: the sheer beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.
Joy can be a practiced achievement not just the unlooked for passing act of grace arriving out of nowhere, joy is a measure of our relationship to death and our living with death, joy is the act of giving ourselves away, joy is practiced generosity. If joy is a deep form of love, it is also the raw engagement with the passing seasonality of existence, the fleeting presence of those we love going in and out of our lives, faces, voices, memory, aromas of the first spring day or a wood fire in winter, the last breath of a dying parent as they create that rare, raw, beautiful frontier between loving presence and a new and blossoming absence.
To feel a full untrammeled joy is to walk through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self felt itself like a death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, seen in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a familiar face – I am here and you are here and together we make a world.
– Joy by David Whyte
Listen to Andrew Gold sing Thank You for being a Friend http://youtu.be/Jzrq52qaXZI
photos found atwww.pinterest.com
life: acoustic & amplified 