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
how can you call it a sacrifice when you do it willingly because you believe in it? – Aung San Suu Kyi
I am this morning meadow
into which you pour yourself.
I am the still air
in which you rise, a mountain, huge.
I am this city street
which you walk, a crowd
with your stories, your nations.
I am this bird
and you are flight, and song.
I am the ocean
and you are my water.
I am the desert
and you are my stillness.
I am this heart
and you are my beating.
You are this day
into which you pour me,
breath by breath.
Together,
we are this life.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
there is no cage
love must be stepped into
freely.
there is no withholding
love gives it all away.
there is no have to’s
love must be given and received willingly.
there is no selfish motive
love always wants the highest and best for the other person.
there are no ‘no’s’
love always says yes.
love takes commitment.
it is not an easy job,
both parties –
equal and
100 percent in it.
you must choose what you want,
along with the consequences of those choices.
Just know, for sure,
love will always set you free
there is no fear in love
AL
My life was the size of my life.
Its rooms were room-sized,
its soul was the size of a soul.
In its background, mitochondria hummed,
above it sun, clouds, snow,
the transit of stars and planets.
It rode elevators, bullet trains,
various airplanes, a donkey.
It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.
It ate, it slept, it opened
and closed its hands, its windows.
Others, I know, had lives larger.
Others, I know, had lives shorter.
The depth of lives, too, is different.
There were times my life and I made jokes together.
There were times we made bread.
Once, I grew moody and distant.
I told my life I would like some time,
I would like to try seeing others.
In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.
I was hungry, then, and my life,
my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep
our hands off our clothes on
our tongues from
💃🏻
My Life Was the Size of My Life by Jane Hirshfield
… and if what I desperately think I want doesn’t happen…God, and life, are still good…
😘
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
🌎
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
It’s all connected
All the love
All the loss
All the joy
All the pain
The world is made of God
We live in the ocean of his breath
Life is love is truth is love is Life
All connected
Everything I really needed to know
I learned from the ocean
and the trees.
The mountains
Introduced me to the angels.
Acorns were my very first teachers and the finest flock of seagulls
were my most recent.
We are the temple
‘We’ includes the universe
we find ourselves in
brothers and sisters
to stars and starships
🌎
AL
photos by Fisherman Dan @ Branford, CT
listen to Jack Johnson sing Upside Down http://youtu.be/dqUdI4AIDF0
🍁
If you stand at the edge of the forest
and stare into it
every tree at the edge will blow a little extra
oxygen toward you
It has been proven
Leaves have admitted it
The pines I have known
have been especially candid
One said
that all breath in this world
is roped together
that breathing is
the most ancient language
🔹
Ancient Language by Hannah Stephenson
A bright gold canary diamond
In the middle of a row of emeralds
Light sparkles on brilliant color
Natures jewels glimmering in sunlight
Trees can’t help but be happy with who they are.
Beloved
Comfortable
Extravagantly, audaciously beautiful
Spectacularly themselves
Totally at home where they’re planted
Reaching for the sky
Content to be rooted and grounded
Letting their leaves come and go
As they see fit
watching all the dancing
as seasons come and go.
Knowing there will always be abundance
Giving us life giving oxygen with,
not even a whisper,
of quid pro quo
jealousy,
or manipulation.
Trees are magnificent.
I can’t help but admire
their character and integrity
Their deep wisdom and acceptance of life.
Their mystery and playfulness.
Their understanding and gracious giving hearts.
Even driving down the busiest of highways during rush hour
becomes a beautiful experience
when you spend the moments of the stop-n-go
looking out your car window
at the show being put on
right next to the roadway
🔹
AL
other photos found @ www.pinterest.com
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
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
The sojourning spirit is deep within each of us, if we’d listen, but it is not fundamentally about finding ‘the job’ or ‘the voice’ or ‘the degree’ or ‘the position’. The journey, at least as I know it, is a journey to union. It is a journey from fragmentation to wholeness, a journey from exile to home, a journey from attachment to union, a journey from hiding to “being hidden” in Christ, a journey from neurosis to theosis. – Chuck deGroat
life: acoustic & amplified 