This month’s Mud Puddles to Meteors newsletter has a link to the Snail Mail 2015 Challenge. I love sending and receiving personal mail but it happens so rarely as we are more apt to hop on our computers or phones to send a message. There is something so warming and delightful about finding a hand-written note or a little piece of art in the mail!
If you’d like to spread some warmth this winter season, hop on over to the Snail Mail Challenge!
Oh my goodness…this is good. I have watched this in multiple sittings as there are seven parts but it’s so worth it. Take the time.
a lovely little book about the loss of childhood
In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs
we were talking about the effect of smoking and L said, “If there was a pill like microphage and neutrophil white blood cells that eat bacteria, we could put the pill in water, wait until it evaporates, then drink it, then it eats up the smoky stuff in the lungs”.
I really didn’t know what to say. cute. then I had to look it up.
~smile~
A good friend of mine just sent me this video on youtube and I had to share it here. It’s all about being who you are and inspiring others to do the same too. Kind of goes along with my previous post a bit, I think.
Kids are the most wonderful of people and geez, God bless them, because if it wasn’t for them and their moxy I think we would all give up. We are born whole and ready for anything, wearing our emotions on our sleeves and showing our true heart but somewhere along the way, we become human.
I guess that’s the downside of growing up and not always having valuable and consistent role models, those who are inspired and inspiring. I try, everyday, to instill blessed values on my children, and they get it. But, I have to do it everyday so that when the human world of greed, ego and selfish-self-righteousness rears its ugly head they will be strong enough to already know who they are and know that all creatures are precious and no life is worth less than another. That goes for our fragile and amazingly precious Mother Earth.
~shine~
“No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”
–John Ruskin
~love~
Just one more excerpt.
I just want time to do my one life well.
Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. I can slow the torrent by being all here. I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment. And when I’m always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter. And time slows. Weigh down this moment in time with attention full, and the whole of time’s river slows, slows, slows.
You may want to read it. She had me in tears on the second page by her childhood ache and her poetic writing. Transfixed.
An exerpt…she clears the confusion of my ever-wondering mind. She is poetic.
I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for the early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring the fullest Light to all the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
One for the wall.
Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow”.