Love came to tell me,
‘there is nothing that does not include me…
from your breath
to the neighbor
who is hard to ‘tolerate.’
Everything is love
it’s all connected
it’s all life’s about
So, Love came to call,
to tell me,
to make sure I truly understood,
what love looks like.
The real thing
is costly,
is all powerful,
all encompassing.
Yes, love came
and stayed,
whispering in my ear,
every damn day
reminding me,
‘There is nothing
that does not include me…
nothing’
😘
AL
I will make you brooches
and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning
and star-shine at night.
I will make a palace fit for you and me
Of green days in forests
and blue days at sea.
I will make my kitchen,
and you shall keep your room,
Where white flows the river
and bright blows the broom,
And you shall wash your linen
and keep your body white
In rainfall at morning
and dewfall at night.
And this shall be for music
when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing,
the rare song to hear!
That only I remember,
that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches
and the roadside fire.
🌺
I Will Make You Brooches by Robert Louis Stevenson
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.
🌸
– Rumi
Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.
💋
– Ilsa Lund, Casablanca
This world doesn’t improve by demanding perfection. It improves when we reach through our armor and touch another with tenderness. It improves when we bust through the walls of our conditioning, and try a new way of being on for size. It improves when we work through our unresolved shadow and share what little light we can find. It is the small, positive steps that we take when we are at war with ourselves that change the world.
– Jeff Brown
awe…
examination…
it keeps appearing
again…
I delete…
and again…
I delete…
and again
haven’t I already written this poem?
haven’t I already done that before?
What is left…
that I don’t know…
that I haven’t taken out…
haven’t examined properly?
There are always more layers
An onion…revealing more onion
layers…
upon layers…
illusions,
shadows,
truth left to excavate,
healing to be won,
motivations to uncover,
mystery to be discovered,
always more.
God keeps getting bigger
as I examine,
I reduce,
I open.
help me to stay in this mode of learning…
growth…
humble me…
soften me…
my best self emerges within this process
send it again…
remind me again…
💞
AL
Around 15 years ago now
I took a business trip
Somewhere in the middle of Florida
I was hostess for a community meeting
to talk about a new electrical line route and sub-station
proposed for this area
by the electric company I worked for at the time
I was with a team
We stayed in a local bed and breakfast
I had breakfast with a married couple
from somewhere west of Orlando,
can’t remember the town,
who were prophets of God.
Don’t ask me how I know,
I just do.
I was still learning to open to mystery
(my fundamental Baptist background
was being constantly challenged)
and I was early in my ‘testing’ to find out if God was really real,
I was early in my healing from the abuse,
shattering and loss I had gone through in the past years of my life.
Then, somehow, this couple and I were alone together –
the rest of the team out checking out the project route.
I ended up in their room.
I told them some of my story.
I sang for them.
They prayed over me,
anointed me with oil,
proclaimed and prophesied my future.
They wrote prophesy down on paper,
then burned it in the fireplace.
It was all a little weird and surreal,
more than a little scary,
and yet I knew they were sent there,
at that very place and time,
because God sent them there for me.
I do not know their names,
I never saw them again,
the business card they left me had a number which was not active –
Curiosity made me call that number a few weeks later.
Number not in service.
I never told anyone about this.
It was a very strange episode I kinda ignored.
I’ve never spoken, or written, about it since,
until now,
all these years later.
It keeps coming back to me lately,
since I recently spent an unexpected evening with
one of those project team members I was traveling with on that fateful trip.
I still don’t understand it,
but I am grateful,
I realize how far God’s grace has lead me
since the day of my unexpected, mysterious, anointing.
❣
AL
Blessed be the longing that brought you here
And quickens your soul with wonder.
May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
That disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.
May you have the wisdom to enter generously into
your own unease
To discover the new direction your longing wants
you to take.
May the forms of your belonging — in love, creativity
and friendship —
Be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.
⚾️
– John O’Donohue
there’s so much more to me 😊
than the color of my eyes 👁👁
the curve of my lips 👄
I am full of wild:
flowers 🌸
and
fires 🔥
/
desire 😈
and
laughter😄
/
passion 💃🏻
and
purpose 📚
the natural cravings of life:
love ❤️
and
touch 🖐🏼
/
home 🏡
and
protection 💪
/
to be fully known
and
accepted
I carry in my bones:
music 🎼
and
poems ✏️
/
pain 🙁
and
sorrow 😢
/
healing 💝
and
hope 💓
I ache with the need to share:
darkness 🌓
and
light 🌗
/
work 👷🏼
and
play 💑
/
faith 🙏🏻
and
friendship 👫
I think about you all the time 😍
today I wonder…
what happens next? ⁉️
only time will tell 🕰
❣
AL
The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer,
you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer,
because the person
in question is yourself,
and on that
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming,
but lie
flat and peaceful.
🙏🏻
The Hand by Mary Ruefle
I try to clean up
pick up pieces of myself
from all over the frozen ground
Who knew hearts can turn into
Slivers of glass
dangerous to handle
Slice my fingers
I rub tears from my eyes
and find toxic rivers
Red flows
Staining all of life
Small killing shards everywhere
Thousands
Maybe millions
They stick to the inside of my chest
My throat
Puncture my lungs
Settle in my stomach
as I try to eat breakfast
It’s getting harder and harder to speak
To breathe
To stand
I fall face first into a pool
Of freezing water
The glass becomes ice
Eventually I crawl out of the water
but the ice remains
a solid block I live with
for 9 years
Containment my highest priority
Walking dead
until that box breaks open
I begin to grieve
and begin slowly melting
Fusing shattered pieces
absorbing them into
the fabric of my living
Im still working on it
Still looking for the fire of love
to refine the gold
Scars show the hearts broken places
for glimmers of light to shine through
As grieving does it’s healing work
And I become human
Once again
❤️
AL
On this bitter-sweet morning
I spot the jar,
and slowly,
deliberately,
lick the white-golden sticky.
Spun honey directly from the spoon.
Remembering…
my Grandma Duvall
always had spun honey,
and so many other beautiful treats,
at her house.
As a little girl,
I loved it…
I love it still –
tho it goes right to my head,
and makes me a bit dizzy.
Buzzz…..Buzzzzz
Mature tastebuds know…
there must be balance.
Wisdom is learning to choose balance.
I think of how kind words are compared to honey.
How important it is to choose the sweet,
right in the middle of the bitter,
the choice is all mine.
I suck the last bit off the spoon,
and move along into my day,
carrying the smile,
the sticky, sweet, stolen glow,
of that moment with me.
A bit of healing sweetness
right there in the kitchen.
A bit of amazing grace
right in the mess of my moments.
A bit of heaven,
right here and now,
on a mixed – up Monday.
🐝
AL
To love everything, not just parts …
To love all of yourself, not just certain traits …
To rest in not knowing …
To carry the cross
and to lay your burden down …
To savor the medicine blue of moon,
the fierce sugar of tangerine …
To be a Christ unto others,
a Christ unto one’s self …
To laugh …
To be shameless, wild, and silly …
To know—fully, headlong,
without compunction—the ordinary magic
of our beautiful human bodies …
these seem worthwhile pursuits, life-long tasks.
All is grace.
⚜
selected from/ A Poem for My Daughter by Teddy Macker
It is the work of feeling,
to undo expectation.
A black-faced sheep
looks back at you as you pass
and your heart is startled
as if by the shadow
of someone once loved.
Neither comforted by this
nor made lonely.
Only remembering
that a self in exile
is still a self,
as a bell unstruck for years
is still a bell.
🔔
Sheep by Jane Hirshfield
photo sources found at http://www.pinterest.com
A word about Communication:
“In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibility, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations.
Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant or apparent.
In other words, talk plainly, briefly, naturally, sensibly, truthfully, purely. Keep from slang; don’t put on airs; say what you mean; mean what you say.”
And DON’T USE BIG WORDS!
-Cybersalt
try reading this aloud! 🙂 
I love you wild –
like oceans, volcanoes, tsunamis and bees
I love you natural –
like seasons, rainbows, and falling leaves
I love you large –
like Grand Canyon’s,
the mountains and sky
I love you small –
like the atom, lady bugs, birds flying high
I love you tender –
like mamas with babies,
and soft, falling rain
I love you strong –
like soldiers with orders,
and wind on the plains
I love you like every cliche ever written
I love you with words that can never be spoken
I love you in mystery I can’t understand
when hearing your voice
or seeing your hands
I love you deeper than knowledge
and wider than life
You fill me with beauty,
with music,
yes,
you fill me with life.
👫
AL
It is big sky and its changes,
the sea all round and the waters within.
It is the way sea and sky
work off each other constantly,
like people meeting in Alfred Street,
each face coming away with a hint
of the other’s face pressed in it.
It is the way a week-long gale
ends and folk emerge to hear
a single bird cry way high up.
It is the way you lean to me
and the way I lean to you, as if
we are each other’s prevailing;
how we connect along our shores,
the way we are tidal islands
joined for hours then inaccessible,
I’ll go for that,
and smile when I
pick sand off myself in the shower.
The way I am an inland loch to you
when a clatter of white whoops and rises…
It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
the way we enter friends’ houses
to leave what we came with, or flick
the kettle’s switch and wait.
This is where I want to live,
close to where the heart gives out,
ruined, perfected,
an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through
instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound
the ferry’s engines thrum
this life this life this life.
⛴
Orkney / This Life Andrew Greig
For Catherine and Jamie
this birth of awaiting changes
this for that
tit for tat
tuxedo memories
pinstripe debonair
glamour hangs
like confetti in the air
life goes
round and round
flinging dreams
synthetic roads
leading nowhere
screams and laugher
hardest when not fair
up one side now
down the other there
we hang on
we stomp our feet
and swear
this ain’t right
this we cannot bear
life goes forward
ever on and on
wanting only
to change our point of view
we are loved
no matter what we lose
love will win
love’s always
life’s sweet muse
sight or blind
the vision ours to choose
❤️
AL
I’ll be the wild that keeps your heart in the clouds and you’ll be the anchor that keeps my feet on the ground.
⚓️
by Victoria Erickson
Hey, wait a minute…(pause…..)
Living artfully with time might only require something as simple as pausing.
—Thomas Moore
Let Me Tell You About Beginnings..
Some people move through your life
like the perfume of peonies, heavy
and sensual and lingering.
Some people move through your life
like the sweet musky scent of cosmos
so delicate if you sniff twice, it’s gone.
Some people occupy your life
like moving men who cart off
couches, pianos and break dishes.
Some people touch you so lightly you
are not sure it happened. Others leave
you flat with footprints on your chest.
Some are like those fall warblers
you can’t tell from each other even
though you search Petersen’s.
Some come down hard on you like
a striking falcon and the scars remain
and you are forever wary of the sky.
We all are waiting rooms at bus
stations where hundreds have passed
through unnoticed and others
have almost burned us down
and others have left us clean and new
and others have just moved in.
👫👬👫👭👫
The visible and the in- by Marge Piercy
my fellow exalted, beautiful beings,
full of grace,
as we touch and pass,
respectfully remember to forget:
surrender struggles to catch it’s breath,
then falls soft
as evening prayers at twilight,
gathering into the corners of our hearts
before falling full onto the center of our living circle,
free and happy as Friday night.
next morning’s sun fills us,
each day, each season.
nurture moves with grace,
evolving slowly thru
our caring hands,
our grieving hearts,
our shared experience,
our acts of courage,
the healing salt of our tears.
with pieces of our true love,
we fly flags,
of prayer,
of peace,
of poems,
of our own making
to heal the worlds –
within us/
without us.
we allow –
simply complex.
we understand –
clearly unclear.
we stand and fill our world with the beauty
of sound,
of hum,
of voice,
of music,
protecting us
from lesser gods,
the terror all around.
love is the shield,
love is the answer,
love is the choice,
love is our glory,
our salvation,
crowning us
sons and daughters
of stars and starships.
at times,
in spite of our broken pieces,
shattered places,
our refusal to believe,
even our own darkened hearts.
–
astonishing,
isn’t it?
ok, now forget it all –
and practice tenderness.
💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻
AL
life: acoustic & amplified 