- Photo: Atara Katz
Let your mind weigh anchor.
Oblige your soul to sail.
Release the mooring of your thoughts.
Set your heart free.
Let your spirit
Cruise
Adrift.
For The Daily Post (5/22)
For The Daily Post
Author: Na'ama Yehuda
Descend to Calm
Photo: O. Asif
If your head fleets up and flitters
Filled with too much
And too fast …
Change course
Decelerate and
Descend back to
Calm ground.
For The Daily Post
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Nana the Notorious
Betterphoto.com
He strode up the steps with a grin as wide as the Mississipi, a cup the size of Texas in his hands. The bright contents were positively florescent. His teeth were cornflower blue. His tongue looked painted.
“I have a slushy!” he announced.
“I see!” I commented, amused.
“Nana got me,” he added.
I smiled. I didn’t think his mom – who kept close watch over her son’s intake of junk of any form – would have gotten him this “certainly-no-food-in-nature-has-this-color” slushy, let alone a bathtub of it.
“Mama’s not home,” the boy declared. “She coming back Friday.”
“In San-Francisco,” Nana made an appearance at the landing leading to the last flight of stairs. “Business meetings.” She was a little out of breath but seemed as ebullient as her grandson. Her arms were laden with the boy’s panda bear backpack, her purse, a shopping bag, a phone, and her own cup of icy drink. Coffee, from the looks of it.
“Nana taking care of me,” he stated the obvious. He snuck a conspiratorial grin at his grandmother. “We got candy!” he pointed to the bag.
“For after dinner,” she blushed.
“But I can have one now,” he clarified. “Nana said.”
Her blush deepened and I chuckled.
“For right now, how about you take another sip or two from your slushy, then we’ll put it in the fridge where it can stay cold while we work,” I said.
The boy deflated some and glanced at his grandma, maybe to see if she’ll support him in a mutiny if he refused to part with his icy treat.
“I’ll take a sip from my ice-coffee and we can put my cup in the fridge, too,” she soothed. “This way we’ll both have some for the ride home, too!”
He pondered, eyebrows still in a huddle. “But I can have candy, right?”
She looked at me. “It’s gummies.”
“Sure,” I nodded. “You can have one, like Nana said you could. The rest will wait in the bag for you.”
His smile returned and he slurped more of the blue liquid. Then we ceremoniously made room for it in the fridge. Even without the tall straw, it dwarfed Nana’s “grande” cup.
The boy wiped both hands on his shirt, reached into the shopping bag and dug out a yellow gummy shaped suspiciously like a spider. He laughed at my exaggerated fright. “You’re silly! It’s not real. It’s just candy!”
He stuffed it into his mouth and spoke around it as he shimmied to his seat. “We having pizza for dinner, and we’ll watch a whole movie after. With popcorn even!”
“Sounds like you two are making the most of it,” I laughed.
“She’s so strict with him,” the grandmother confided. “She’s a great mom, don’t get me wrong, but all this no this, no that …” She caressed her grandson’s cheek and lowered herself to the couch with a sigh. “These stairs!”
“A kid’s gotta’ live a little,” she added. Her eyes sparkled. “I have him for two days and I intend to do my very best to spoil him.”
For The Daily Post
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Beyond Farce
Photo: Darwin Bell on Flickr
When farce becomes routine
And drama so outruns minutiae
That reason threatens
To abscond,
One cannot help but
Wonder
What’s beyond.
For The Daily Post
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Precipice
As you stand at the precipice
Of truth
Take heed.
The climb back up
Is steep
If you lose grip
To deceit
Or greed.
For The Daily Post
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Qualm Balm
When you fret in worry,
Field misgivings,
Try to still the shiver
Of concern
Of doubt
Of qualm.
Take a moment
To get grounded
And remember what you know
In soul, in heart, in mind:
Sooth exists.
It
Lives
Between the breaths
Of Love’s
Eternal
Balm.
For The Daily Post
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Collaboration
Photo-Jason Groepper
The earth, the air, the water;
The sun, the sea, the dust of stars;
The times that passed and built the present;
Things nascent now that
Have not yet become –
All intertwined.
We’re none of us alone
Or separate.
Aware or not,
Collaboration
Is and always been
The only way
For life
Aligned.
For The Daily Post
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Welcoming Hearts
For all the mothers, biological and adoptive, temporary or ‘forever,’ immediate and surrogate, spiritual, female and otherwise …
A day of thanks, for open hearts.
A day for those who carry, hold, deliver, care-for;
For those who pat-the-back-of-babies through long nights, who walk a groove into the floors in the new-parent-dance;
For those who wipe the brow of fever, whose arms and hands are never empty, who fill a plate for others before sitting down for theirs;
For those who watch over the children while their parents cannot be there – day in and day out, in emergency, or any needed time;
For those who fret and worry, contemplate and weigh each day, each milestone, each possible advance to a child’s healthy growing;
For those who open every corner of their heart for love far bigger than imagined;
For those who welcome little ones (and sometimes not so little) and parent, guide, teach, hug, steer safe, keep whole, allow, provide;
For those who still raise pieces of themselves even as they are called to raise others;
For those determined to change course from paths that harm, to ones that cradle;
For those who let be known that children matter, who fight to make the world a better place for those unable yet to lead but destined to inherit what we will leave them;
For the hospitality of parenting souls of all kinds;
For the depth of care so many offer;
For the triumphs and the challenges:
Deep thanks.
For The Daily Post
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A Way Out
Clay Tablet Babylon (Ca. 2000-1700 BC); SCHOYENCOLLECTION.com
“I just get lost,” she sighed. Her pre-teen face was creased with dejection.
Schoolwork is hard for her. She tries but often fails to live up not only to the expectations of her school, but also – and harder still – to her own views of perfection. She begins. Gives up. Procrastinates. Misses deadlines. Then needs to make-up what she had delayed as well as keep up with current assignments. School is a merry-go-round of stress and frustration.
“Lost how?” I prompted. Not only did I want to understand more about what she’d meant (rather than assume I knew it), but one of the things we’d been working on is expanding her ability to narrate her feelings and perceptions, explain and communicate her needs.
She glanced at me, not quite in irritation, but almost.
“I’m not being tricky,” I smiled. “I really want to understand.”
“Fine,” she sighed again. Her brow furrowed as she thought, and she reached over to the pad of paper that rested on the desk between us. Doodling can sometimes help make paths for words.
She scribbled for a moment, then her breath deepened and she flipped to a new page on the pad. “It’s like this,” she said.
She drew a labyrinthine squiggle that turned several times onto itself. Added another squiggle that sprouted from it, then another, and another. Sketched a stick figure at one end of the criss-crossed creation and a bulls-eye at the other. Looked up at me to see if I’m still paying attention.
Very much so. I smiled encouragement.
“I have stuff to do and I think I know how, but I start doing it and then I get stuck,” she moved her finger over the squiggle till it ‘hit a wall.’ “So I go back, and I try another way … and I get stuck again,” her finger slid on top of the paper to another dead-end.
She looked up again. Her eyes were bright.
“So I get lost …” she swiveled her finger around the squiggly lines in a half-aimless, half-frantic manner. “It’s too hard. I give up.”
“I hear you. I really do.” I nodded, lifted my pen, and drew another squiggle around hers, connecting the pencil figure with the bulls-eye. “We need to find a better way. A way without a maze.”
For The Daily Post
Na'ama Yehuda 
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