Your life isn’t behind you; your memories are behind you. Your life is ALWAYS ahead of you. Today is a new day. Seize it! – Steve Maraboli
Listen to Frank Sinatra sing The Best Is Yet to Come http://youtu.be/TOyeyOEmFtE
🍒🍓🍎🍉🍊🍏🍑🍌🍇🍋🍐
Photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
watch and listen to Sir Ken Robinson on the Power of Imagination! If you haven’t seen his TED talk about education…it’s a very worthwhile watch!! http://youtu.be/ywtLnd3xOVU
Listen to Maroon 5 sing Pure Imagination http://youtu.be/cWGeCqszY8s
🙇🏻🙇🏻🙇🏻🙇🏽🙇🏾🙇🏿🙇🙇🏻
photo sources at www.pinterest.com/al513
Listen to Sara Barelleis sing Vegas http://youtu.be/HOHK2sXoIVw
🎼🎼🎼🎼🎼🎼🎼🎼🎼🎼🎼
photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
Listen to Bon Jovi sing It’s My Life http://youtu.be/9SKFwtgUJHs
photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
Nobody loves such days,
everything smudged in powdered lead,
the whites all off, the blacks dull
like the bad side of a mirror.
Yet in a world of shadows
what matters are not the highlights
but the shades of grays.
This river, for instance, a sooty snake
mirroring an oatmeal sky.
But watch it eddy and swirl,
and gradually the lead turns silver, begins
to blaze from within, as if begging the sun
to bust out of its straight-jacket.
And shine. Which the sun very nearly does.
But in the end, it can’t be bothered.
It says, Sparkle yourself.
And eventually we do. Van Gogh returns
to the sea-light of his youth.
Sews the ear back on.
Trades his magentas and cyans
for a # 2 pencil. It is all in the shading,
he realizes. The pursuit of raging hues
was madness. God, no longer
in the rainbowed flame,
but in this wan, uncertain earthlight:
this almost-shimmer on a river.
Whatever plain brown paper wrapper
the day comes in.
☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️
Gray Scale by Richard Schiffman
☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️
Listen and watch Gene Kelly Singing in the Rain http://youtu.be/D1ZYhVpdXbQ
backbones get built
vertebrae by vertebrae
with every victory
with every heartache
with every triumph
with every shattering
with each awakening
they become sturdy
bearing the weight of new consciousness
embodying self-love
strengthened, emboldened
yet still flexible, yet still able
to make flowing and fluid movement
undulating with pulsing life
able to stand firm in the face of a challenge or adversity
backbones don’t magically appear because we wish them into being
backbones need nurturing and kindness and discipline and conviction and intention
and desire
to form and develop
they help us be stalwart and valiant
protecting the soft, vulnerable, tender inner parts of our being
robust, hearty boundaries that
don’t cut us off from nourishment — they make sure we’re getting the right kind
the fortitude to love, not blindly, but with courage.
💪🏻💪🏾💪🏽💪🏼💪🏿💪🏼💪
How Backbones Get Built by Eloiza Jorge
https://deepeningwisdom.wordpress.com/2015/05/25/how-backbones-get-built-a-poem/
Never quit. Never. Rest when you need to, then get back up. Strength comes as you walk. Backbones come one good choice at a time.
Listen to Katy Perry sing Roar http://youtu.be/CevxZvSJLk8
photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
I, may I rest in peace—I, who am still living, say,
May I have peace in the rest of my life.
I want peace right now while I’m still alive.
I don’t want to wait like that pious man who wished for one leg
of the golden chair of Paradise, I want a four-legged chair
right here, a plain wooden chair. I want the rest of my peace now.
I have lived out my life in wars of every kind: battles without
and within, close combat, face-to-face, the faces always
my own, my lover-face, my enemy-face.
Wars with the old weapons—sticks and stones, blunt axe, words,
dull ripping knife, love and hate,
and wars with newfangled weapons—machine gun, missile,
words, land mines exploding, love and hate,
I don’t want to fulfill my parents’ prophecy that life is war.
I want peace with all my body and all my soul.
Rest me in peace.
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
I, May I Rest in Peace by Yehuda Amichai
For all whose lives have been taken by war,
grant your mercy O God.
For soldiers, civilians, those wounded and neglected,
grant your mercy, O God.
For earth despoiled and living beings sacrificed,
grant your mercy, O God.
For our glorification of war and violence
and our willingness to hurt others
to defend ourselves,
grant your mercy, O God.
We give thanks for your beloved
whom we have sacrificed;
we ask blessing for their loved ones,
confess our need for your grace,
and pray for the redemption of society.
Spirit of compassion and gentleness,
in the name of the One who was sacrificed,
save us by your grace,
and grant us your mercy.
Amen
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
🇺🇸 happy Memorial Day
Listen to Garth sing We Shall Be Free http://youtu.be/13s9eciFDzA
Quote photo sources found at www.pinterest.com
Our Lord has written resurrection not in books alone—but in every leaf in springtime. – Martin Luther
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.
For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.
It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
Hope and renewal and rebirth are at the heart of things.
The world in winter looks so much as if it’s dying—and yet, and yet …
The frozen streams heard him sigh…
“We’ll run again!” they seemed to cry.
The tall dead grasses all were rustling…
“But we’re not dead, we’re only sleeping!”
The lost flowers were singing on and on…
“But we’re only hidden, we’re not gone!”
That tiny green shoot preached to me that morning. About hope. About joy.
And about vulnerability—which isn’t weakness, but true strength.
Everywhere we look, God is speaking to us. His creation is singing to us. The Heavens are shouting it out. It’s not what it looks like! There is hope beyond the walls of the world!
That Joy is at the heart of things.
That a Light shines beneath it all.
That Love runs the universe.
The more childlike we become — the more like God we are.
And really, it shouldn’t surprise us that God is “younger” than we are.
After all, it wasn’t a general, or a warrior, or a politician God sent to rescue His broken world —
It was a baby.
👶🏻👶🏻👶🏻👶🏻👶🏻👶🏻👶🏻
– Sally Lloyd-Jones on A Holy Experience
Photos by Fisherman Dan @ Branford CT
Listen to Keb’ Mo sing Closer http://youtu.be/Fdv-KafABk4
THIS IS ENOUGH!
Listen to John Legend sing All of Me http://youtu.be/Mk7-GRWq7wA
photo source at www.pinterest.com/al513
Bright Morning Star
I’m wandering through aisles in Barnes and Noble on Saturday. Wandering, wondering…hoping to find something I need to read, something to help me where I hurt and feel overwhelmed right now. I scan titles, can’t really focus, in the Christian aisle. I’ve read many of these books, nothing seems to be ‘it’ ugh. sigh. Surely I’m not past hope.
Suddenly, I see this book. Beth Moore (love her) 10 weeks of Devotional Prayer. Ah. Prayer! THAT’S what I need right now. Intense prayer. Prayer. Changes. ME!
I buy it, still in my fog. Sunday morning I will realize the name connection of this book, Whispers of Hope. My daughter, Krista, has just written a fictional, fantasy of her life story called, Whispers of Heaven. I bow in gratitude for these whispers speaking in my life, changing things, breathing hope in new ways.
And so I begin this 10 week journey into prayer. Learning to love more deeply and truly, open myself more fully, praise, and praise more, all good things, communicate deeper with spirit, learning intimacy in new areas of trust and allow for life changing power to flow in and through me.
Listen to Jackie Velasquez On My Knees
life: acoustic & amplified 