life: acoustic & amplified

favorite places

Daises above and heart cloud in blue sky photos by me 😊

Is it

the season?

the sky?

the sea?

or simply new shades of blue

writing love poems across across sky?

💞

Amy Lloyd

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?

—Wisława Szymborska

My handwriting is all over these woods.

No, my handwriting is these woods,

each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl,

each loop a limb. My house is somewhere

here, & I have scribbled myself inside it.

What is home but a book we write, then

read again & again, each time dog-earing

different pages. In the morning I wake

in time to pencil the sun high. How

fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote

the word but caught myself. Either one

could be erased. In these written woods,

branches smudge around me whenever

I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns

lie in the written sunlight that dapples

their backs. What is home but a passage

I’m writing & underlining every time I read it.

–

Written Deer by Maggie Smith

Robin O’Neal magical photos above @ Lindner Park

A few seconds before happiness

tore poems from my heart

it occurs to me

once again

that everything is grace

both sides of the gift are equal

that to fly free and ride the shining sunbeams

means trusting your pilot completely

even in the uneven spaces pushing against us

knowing my pilot opens my soul to sheer beauty

to rivers of adventure cutting through my grids of protection

through my grasping of thin shreds

through unnecessary issues of control

I am suddenly aware

the gates to the kingdom live right here

open when I step forward

in this confident level of knowing

in this bursting moment of joy

in this perfect snowflake of eternal beauty

created just to melt unseen by mortals

forever imprinted into this worlds history

just because

all because

in every which way

because of love

✈️

Amy Lloyd

just feel it

writing poems in the dark

the soul stills to wonder

the heart grows quiet in worship

I stand within this circle of amazing grace

the breeze grows cooler with every whispered word

in the distance grapevine tells its tangled stories

the last joyful crimson stripes of day

fade to bluest black of restful slumber

silently awaiting mornings cheerful coming

All I can do is feel

I am praying

🙏🏻

Amy Lloyd

ee Cummings

advice to a student poet:

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel-but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling-not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time-and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world-unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

a few reasons why…

It must have been the light

It must have been the crowd

It must have been the humidity

It must have been the melting ice cubes

It must have been the falling water

It must have been the greening tree

It must have been the excuses

It must have been the brownie brittle

It must have been the laughing hyenas

It must have been the deep breathing

It must have been the spin cycle

It must have been the old, soft blanket

It must have been the smell of your memory

It must have been my aching bones

It must have been the fading sunset

It must have been the red lipstick

It must have been the pink flamingos

It must have been the honey bee

It must have been the belly ache

It must have been the wrong number

It must have been the heavy frame

It must have been the noise of the fireworks

It must have been the stormy weather

It must have been the smoothest ride

It must have been the smiling eyes

It must have been the perfect fit

It must have been the best martini

It must have been a peaceful morning

It must have been the right combination

It must have been a power walk

It must have been the sweetest taboo

It must have been exceptional

It must have been the arrival at my own front door

It must have been a good, good girl

It must have been my new boundaries

It must have been letting go of the past

It must have been the anticipation of your kiss

It must have been something I can’t put my finger on

It must have been a God-thing

❤️

Amy Lloyd

on a day like today

time after time…

yet this time more so

I lock up suitcases filled with tears.

don’t you think it’s strange,

how a shared pancake can be life changing?

the opposite of the final straw.

a volcanic catalyst for the rising curtain of new beginning,

starting a chain reaction

Life-changes of Biblical proportion.

an all new free-fall dive

into the inner deep.

silence tearing up the very foundations

of my ocean floor

as you walk away.

I am moving very slow.

dizzy and off balance.

Even with this life lived on the extreme edge

of the radical cliffs of self-examination.

Seven days of seismic eruption

create chaotic activity so great

that life will never be the same.

dreams gestating in the souls womb

burst

stillborn

yet ready to scream

in their own voice…

PLEASE…do not let me die…

this truth no longer able to remain hidden

inside its clay container.

Seven days so extraordinary

they have forever changed my world

as I have always known it.

Leading to the uncomfortable uncovering of the bones of my very foundation.

exposing the shadowy villains of my learned weaknesses.

giving me new zeal to heal those naked, shattered places.

keep letting goooo

Keep choosing to be soft,

in spite of the gripping fear.

for now, vulnerability, must be my only guide,

forward

the only way out is through

into the fury of places I have long avoided.

in all of this,

grieving a weeks glimpse of what creation looked like

before the great fall of that one small bite

this aleph-vision-long-awaited life I’ve held in faith that could be.

and so because of

I swear I will no longer hold back anything in this lifetime

but fully, wholly, inhabit my own destiny.

Myself

as

I am

when I fall completely,

head over heels,

in love.

💞

Amy Lloyd

The great cathedral, reliquary of dust,

stones slowly vanishing, not one on another,

glacial, archaeological, yet prayers still hover,

the vast city built on a plan now lost, underfoot,

abandoned, inhabited now by the unknowing,

descendants of descendants, but still dancing,

the shirt you loved longest, tattered like Grecian isles,

a screen, threads gently departing one from another,

the years it recalls, also faded, emptied,

the characters you’ve played, all victory and debacle,

the strength to bend this world to you—all is husk.

Your flesh, your proof, your precious dust—all go.

Let them go, let them be, or not be. The husk gives way.

The miracle, that most is, is in the seed.

You are the growing child within your aging womb,

the love your flesh inhabits, unfolding, unending,

renewing, chrysalis after chrysalis, your tender Lover

working every wound and find and step into a gift.

This is who you are, the river, not the bank,

the flowing, heaven’s breathing, new, and new,

and every moment singing, “Let there be light.”

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light

http://www.unfoldinglight.net

I’ll be a witness

Everybody’s writing a book

Full to the edges with stories of brokenness

smutty sensational stuff

sex, drugs and handguns

prison time and scandals with the local preacher

Im too tired to tango

Coming to terms with my own past

at least at the present moment

resting in the knowledge that I am just enough

tho not that special after all

Which makes me laugh out loud

I no longer carry the world on my shoulders

Atlas has long ago faded from the scene

Holding up my piece of the blue sky

Requires my full attention

I rest in any spare moment I can garner

Ever learning this afresh –

God equals Love!

triangle becomes circle

as does every other shape of the heart

I smile a little as step into this sparkly stage

gloriously lighted by personal security

I simply open my mouth

and sing

😍

Amy Lloyd

all shall be well

The hardest thing about hard times is this: You know you’re not in control anymore. (But ask yourself something: Were you ever?) You have to make big changes before you’re ready or suddenly question what you thought you knew. But it’s possible to turn even the most upsetting situations into opportunities for growth if you can muster enough willingness, trust, faith, patience and surrender. Here’s why these qualities are so essential if we are to transcend our troubles.

Willingness

This is the all-important ingredient for making it through tough times. You must be willing to do what you believe you cannot, and acknowledge what you’ve avoided. Yes, this can be painful, but when you are unwilling to see things—and people—as they are, you can’t deal with the problem, and I can guarantee your situation will be prolonged.

Trust and Faith

Very often people confuse these two principles, but they’re very different. Trust is the belief that you can get through anything, and faith is the energy that grows from that trust, helping you carry on until things get better. You can’t have the latter without the former.

Patience

This is the capacity to accept and tolerate difficulty without anger or sorrow—and it’s your lifeline when you find yourself in the midst of a hard time. In the same way that we are unable to rush the sunrise or the unfolding of the seasons, we can’t force ourselves through a challenging experience in less time than we need to learn, heal or grow. Patience makes our difficulties pass as gently as possible.

Surrender

It’s not about giving up or bowing down. It’s about holding on to the knowledge that something bigger and more powerful than you is at work beneath the surface of your experience, and that it will take you exactly where you need to be. Now, in hard times, surrender is probably the greatest challenge you will encounter because it’s so hard to accept uncertainty. But that, my beloved, is the point. You don’t know what’s to come, but you must know that whatever happens, you will be okay.

Iyanla Vanzant

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/inspiration/increasing-resilience-get-through-hard-times#ixzz5HIRYuiOX

imagination

EVEN A THOUSAND MILES inland you can smell the sea and hear the mewing of gulls if you give thought to it. You can see in your mind’s eye the living faces of people long dead or hear in the mind’s ear the United States Marine Band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” If you work at it, you can smell the smell of autumn leaves burning or taste a chocolate malted. You don’t have to be asleep to dream dreams either. There are those who can come up with dramas laid twenty thousand leagues under the sea or take a little girl through a looking glass. Imagining is perhaps as close as humans get to creating something out of nothing the way God is said to. It is a power that to one degree or another everybody has or can develop, like whistling. Like muscles, it can be strengthened through practice and exercise. Keep at it until you can actually hear your grandfather’s voice, for instance, or feel the rush of hot air when you open the 450-degree oven.

If imagination plays a major role in the creation of literature, it plays a major one also in the appreciation of it. It is essential to read imaginatively as well as to write imaginatively if you want to know what’s really going on. A good novelist helps us do this by stimulating our imaginations—sensory detail is especially useful in this regard, such as the way characters look and dress, the sounds and smells of the places they live and so on—but then we have to do our part. It is especially important to do it in reading the Bible. Be the man who trips over a suitcase of hundred-dollar bills buried in the field he’s plowing if you want to know what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about (Matthew 13:44). Listen to Jesus saying, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28) until you can hear him, if you want to know what faith is all about.

If you want to know what loving your neighbors is all about, look at them with more than just your eyes. The bag lady settling down for the night on the hot-air grating. The two children chirping like birds in the branches of a tree. The bride as she walks down the aisle on her father’s arm. The old man staring into space in the nursing-home TV room. Try to know them for who they are inside their skins. Hear not just the words they speak, but the words they do not speak. Feel what it’s like to be who they are—chirping like a bird because for the moment you are a bird, trying not to wobble as you move slowly into the future with all eyes upon you.

When Jesus said, “All ye that labor and are heavy laden,” he was seeing the rich as well as the poor, the lucky as well as the unlucky, the idle as well as the industrious. He was seeing the bride on her wedding day. He was seeing the old man in front of the TV. He was seeing all of us. The highest work of the imagination is to have eyes like that.

⁃ Frederick Buechner

braving

always and ever

we hold eternity in the palm of our hand

life can be found

within the milky way or in a grain of sand

be just a little brave

the rewards are great

nothing worth having is easy

hope is a hard won virtue of continuous choosing

when you see the sunrise

celebrate with everything

and everyone you see

always kiss the checkout girls goodbye

and tip your waiter well

say goodnight, Gracie

Everything is coming up roses and peppercorns

I promise you’ll be so glad you hung in

wonder follows the light

and you, my friend, are the light

a very bright light

🌞

Amy Lloyd

permission granted

You’re allowed to leave any story you don’t find yourself in. You’re allowed to leave any story you don’t love yourself in.

You’re allowed to leave a city that has dimmed your light instead of making you shine brighter, you’re allowed to pack all your bags and start over somewhere else and you’re allowed to redefine the meaning of your life.

You’re allowed to quit the job you hate even if the world tells you not to and you’re allowed to search for something that makes you look forward to tomorrow and to the rest of your life.

You’re allowed to leave someone you love if they’re treating you poorly, you’re allowed to put yourself first if you’re settling and you’re allowed to walk away when you’ve tried over and over again but nothing has changed.

You’re allowed to let toxic friends go, you’re allowed to surround yourself with love, and people who encourage and nurture you. You’re allowed to pick the kind of energy you need in your life.

You’re allowed to forgive yourself for your biggest and smallest mistakes and you’re allowed to be kind to yourself, you’re allowed to look in the mirror and actually like the person you see.

You’re allowed to set yourself free from your own expectations.

We sometimes look at leaving as a bad thing or associate it with giving up or quitting, but sometimes leaving is the best thing you can do for yourself.

Leaving allows you to change directions, to start over, to rediscover yourself and the world. Leaving sometimes saves you from staying stuck in the wrong place with the wrong people.

Leaving opens a new door for change, growth, opportunities and redemption.

You always have the choice to leave until you find where you belong and what makes you happy.

You’re even allowed to leave the old you behind and reinvent yourself.

Author: Rania Naim

Holding the secrets in silence

all these cramped years of painful habits

Screaming within the internal chambers

of backs and necks and shoulders

Mona Lisa vaguely smiling

echoes of wounds inflicted long ago

clinging tightly to every cell wall

reverberations within the halls of ancestral dna

Cloud walking within the storms of terror

silver linings long stripped of value

Snapshots of abuse caught and carried

all these years of walking pilgrim

feet blistered and road weary

I begin draining the swamps of false imprisonment –

Layer by layer

what have I so torturously considered mine –

and deservedly so?

why have I held so tightly to the belief of self flagellation

as my only deserved birthright?

when did I decide to build memorials of abuse

and carry them as dragging pain-filled weighted-toxic marrow in my bones ?

where did this pain become the outline of my identity

the blueprint of my choices?

will I let it go – Now that I’ve seen it?

will I behead this beast, allow the blood to spill?

will I allow this pain to dissolve into a distant misty memory of someone I used to be?

will I claim a new inheritance of pain-free trust and love?

will I stand within the circle of my own dreams

drawn by my truest, strongest and highest self

and sing hallelujahs to the sky?

will I tap into my own unique beauty and recognize my body’s and life’s extreme value?

will I speak the true truth of the way my life will be and then create it as reality?

will I bring rest to myself each day I am blessed to live?

will I build all of these questions into new habits

Yes, I will

Amen and Amen

💞

Amy Lloyd

Circled

A gunshot to the head

Wakes me

Shakes me

I find a definition which speaks

Im ready to begin afresh

time to draw new circles around everything

⭕️

A power shot begins creation

Circles Of care

Circles Of prayer

around my life

this day has finally come

Dare to do all things new

In the merciful morning of this arrival

⭕️

Hit me with your best shot

it’s a glad day

not a sad day

there is a deeper call

Within this circle of faith and trust

within this life of service and song

There is balance and harmony and love

⭕️

Amy Lloyd