When did you last stand
still enough to hear?
The words whose
meaning lie
hidden amongst
the spaces in between.
🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞
by Nic Askew
Listen to “Fragrance” (Live Acoustic Performance) – Mark & Sarah Tillman http://youtu.be/gqGp1xvfZB8
Photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
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
You know the brick path in back of the house,
the one you see from the kitchen window,
the one that bends around the far end of the garden
where all the yellow primroses are?
And you know how if you leave the path
and walk up into the woods you come
to a heap of rocks, probably pushed
down during the horrors of the Ice Age,
and a grove of tall hemlocks, dark green now
against the light-brown fallen leaves?
And farther on, you know
the small footbridge with the broken railing
and if you go beyond that you arrive
at the bottom of that sheep’s head hill?
Well, if you start climbing, and you
might have to grab hold of a sapling
when the going gets steep,
you will eventually come to a long stone
ridge with a border of pine trees
which is as high as you can go
and a good enough place to stop.
The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.
But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.
Still, let me know before you set out.
Come knock on my door
and I will walk with you as far as the garden
with one hand on your shoulder.
I will even watch after you and not turn back
to the house until you disappear
into the crowd of maple and ash,
heading up toward the hill,
piercing the ground with your stick.
☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️
Directions by Billy Collins
Listen to Eva Cassidy sing I know You by Heart http://youtu.be/mlx7Pb-LmSQ
☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️
Photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️
David Whyte
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.
Excerpted from JOY From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Surprising Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
When you send forth your spirit, we are created
—Psalm 104.30
Holy One,
breath of the big bang,
idea of creation,
you who make spring come forth,
who make life out of nothing,
breathe yourself into me.
Create me.
you are the flame,
I am your light.
You are the nerve,
I am your muscle.
You are the Word,
I am the story.
You are the song,
I am the singing.
I am one with you
and one with all Creation.
One Spirit,
one flesh, many forms.
In your Spirit
I am we.
Holy One, live in me;
I am your body.
I remember,
and I live.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
🌌🌄🌅🗻🌈🗾🌋🌠🌍
my words my world my earth my sky
you are them all
my notes my music my score my song
you are them all
my heart my soul my mind my life
you are them all
my blood my breath my skin my bones
you are them all
everything I am everything I hope to be
you are them all
AL
Listen to Amos Lee sing Learned A Lot http://youtu.be/wgzFPP-Fa8o
🗾🌠🗻🌄🌍🌈🌌🌋🌅
photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
[God] seems to delight in using the unexpected, the least likely, or the weakest link to turn our lives upside down and inside out . . . and fulfill the plan he has had in mind since the beginning of time.
~ Thelma Well
💞
sometimes.
I don’t know what to say.
sometimes.
The very words catch behind
safe guards of emotion.
sometimes.
Speech refuses to commence.
sometimes.
Words pool behind the locked door. Waiting.
sometimes.
I lay and pray the words you don’t want to hear will dissolve inside me.
sometimes.
Silence fills the outside air.
sometimes.
Inside air is thick and muggy,
like the rain forest
or Savannah in August.
sometimes.
I go to sleep with heavy lungs,
weight of the unspoken hanging like the world between us.
sometimes.
ACL 6/19/13
Listen to Sara Bareilles sing Brave http://youtu.be/QUQsqBqxoR4
🙊🙉🙈🙊🙉🙈🙊🙉🙈🙊🙉🙈🐵
Photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
One old man keeps humming the same few notes
of some song he thought he had forgotten
back in the days when as he knows there was
no word for life in the language
and if they wanted to say eyes or heart
they would hold up a leaf and he remembers
the big tree where it rose from the dry ground
and the way the birds carried water in their voices
they were all the color of their fear of the dark
and as he sits there humming he remembers
some of the words they come back to him now
he smiles hearing them come and go
🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶
Parts of a Tune by W. S. Merwin
🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶
People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
Later in the day you can act like the others.
Listen to James Taylor sing You’ve Got A Friend http://youtu.be/xEkIou3WFnM
Quote/photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
When I was the stream, when I was the
forest, when I was still the field,
when I was every hoof, foot,
fin and wing, when I
was the sky
itself,
no one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever
wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing
I could not
love.
It was when I left all we once were that
the agony began, the fear and questions came,
and I wept, I wept. And tears
I had never known
before.
So I returned to the river, I returned to
the mountains. I asked for their hand in marriage again,
I begged—I begged to wed every object
and when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
And He did not say,
“Where have you
For then I knew my soul – every soul- has always held
Him.
🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳🌿
“When I Was the Forest” by Meister Eckhart
🌳
Listen to Kari Jobe sing Be Still My Soul http://youtu.be/mq59iE3MhXM
photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
Broken wings can fly?
Who will mend them/who will rend them?
Who will tend them/who will send them?
I have been on the road less traveled
And seen life and death unraveled
Torn and broken down;
And voices filled with gravel!
I have been in nothing more
And seen rapacious roar
And heard the unknown sound
Speaking loudly,
From the ground!
And through my eyes, through the hue
Ebbing ever from greed to blue
Sometimes blinded by the light
Rarely knowing what is right
I travel through the maze
And broken through the haze
But my heart has never broken!
It beats with never ending light
And I know not where it leads me,
But I know it leads to you!
In sky or in the sea,
Always spoken if not seen
Or seen if not spoken;
The vision never broken!
👐🏻👐🏻👐🏻👐🏻👐🏻👐🏻👐🏻
by Matthew Mele
listen to Paul McCartney sing Blackbird http://youtu.be/8ehhZ53zysQ
Photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
This is the house that Jack built! This is the cat that killed the rat This is the cow with the crumpled horn This is the maiden all forlorn This is the man all tattered and torn This is the priest all shaven and shorn This is the cock that crowed in the morn This is the farmer sowing his corn 🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡🏡 This is the House that Jack Built by Anonymous Listen to Miranda Lambert The House that Built Me http://youtu.be/DQYNM6SjD_o Photo sources found at www.pinterest.com/al513
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come with Jesus to the lynching tree
we stand aside and nod
good thing it wasn’t you or me
but just some lamb of god
we sing our hymns we know them well
we sing our righteous songs
and so we send that boy to hell
for that will right our wrongs
some people weeping in the street
they cry the lynching tree
but we can’t quit the judgment seat
the way it has to be
the boy is dead lay out the pall
it’s finished move along
but how come he forgives us all
before we know it’s wrong
how come the god we slight and say
that it’s all right to kill
the god who died comes back our way
and loves us loves us still
it looks so dark the lynching tree
so dark for you and me
but here’s the strangest thing I see
a bud upon that tree
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
Listen to Adele sing http://youtu.be/4k-W6cZ2CiY
💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔
photo source found at www.pinterest.com/al513
life: acoustic & amplified 