Photo: R. RZ
Take a moment
To rest
Ere you once more
Take flight.
Let the weariest
Parts
Lean their weight
With foresight,
For the breath
That will come
Delicate
In the light.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Rest
Delicate Rest
Meditations
Choosing Dandelions
Photo: Hasan Almasi on Unsplash
I wake and turn my back on the clock and seek the comfort of the dream that is still floating like a bubble, already fragile, above my head. It pops and disappears and there is nothing but a vague sense of something lost. I wanted to go back into it … and yet the choice, when it was made in some subterranean neurological net within my mind, was that sleep was to escape.
The day to unfold.
Still, and throughout the mundane tasks of morning, small search-parties like tentative roots into hard-packed sand, send shoots into my consciousness to try and capture whiffs of the dream. A hope that perhaps a fleeting dandelion seed of recollection will find purchase and regrow a stalk.
A place of in-between. Perhaps a corner of my mind is still in slumber. Perhaps if I find it, I will come across the dream, robust in puffy bubble-hood, still tethered to my insides, waiting to be seen.
Sometimes writing helps.
I have too much to do.
I will ignore.
Will choose to sit and breathe and let my mind and fingers wander where they may, the sands of time, the depths of grief, the dawns of days, the fluttering delights, the warmth of recognition, the sorrows of injustice. Currents of discovery of what’s already there. A sea of tethered bubbles like a field of hot-air balloons, straining at the anchors to let loose.
I wrote of a blimp just the day before.
Was that the origin or the reaction to the imagery of bobbing thoughts and fullness so tangible it turns air into rising power? Was the blimp the source or the reflection of the fragility of any skin if pulled too tight, of the leaking deflation if seams are untended, the world upended as it spirals out of flight?
I write. I breathe.
I look pointedly away from the pink sticky notes and the open documents holding forms awaiting filling for a speaking engagement and another for an upcoming presentation and a list of emails needing a response.
I make a choice.
To chase a dandelion.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS Challenge: Choices
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Leonine
Photo: Dvora Freedman
She reposes
In white
Leonine
In the light.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: cat
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Incoming
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
The light on blue-gray water
Waves a landing strip
To bless an incoming flight.
For Becky’s January Squares: Flight
For Terri’s Sunday Stills: Gray
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Darn Yarn
She never did like thready business.
Yet there she was, darning holes, patching elbows, sewing up dangling hems and chasing runs on stockings.
How did it ever come to that?
She squinted and held the needle to the light.
The story of her life, it was. That squeezing through the eye of the needle. Barely, barely making do. Struggling to fit another stitch before the end of her rope.
It was all wrong.
She tied the knot.
It slipped.
She tied another, hoping it would hold. Hoping that the hidden stitches she put in will keep things covered long enough to soothe the chill that ever lurked, awaiting exposed places.
Existing really should not be so threadbare.
The thin wrap of life, knit together moment by moment in complicated patterns of dropped stitches and messy mistakes.
Will it come together at the end?
She did not know, but she hoped.
For Crispina’s Crimson’s Creative Challenge #63
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Fallen
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
I’ve lost connection
With over-tired roots
Fragile
With the passage of the elements
And time.
I’ve let go
To the shifting earth
And to the rocks
Repeatedly cracked open
By frost and sun.
And toppled to lie
Finally
Atop the ground.
Ready to go back
To that from which
I had
Become.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Trees
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Embers Of Dreams
Photo: Pablo Martinez on Unsplash
Blow gently into the embers
Of
Your dreams.
So the quiet flames
Of what you’d always wished
And perhaps did not know how
To do
Can lick them into hope
Anew.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Anew in 31 words
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Sisters Of This Earth And Sky
Photo: Dikla Nachmias
Ladies of the borrowed time,
Mistresses of undemanding,
Mothers bearing down the twine
To faithful understanding,
Sisters of this Earth and sky,
Daughters threading needles of
Life verifying,
Girls who hearts ignore —
I hear you roar.
Do know:
Together we’ll weave words
From crying.
For the dVerse quadrille challenge: roar
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A Different Kind Of Home
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
A moment
For the memory of
A different kind of home,
Where sun sparkles
On the water
And you feel your soul
Fold along the crease
Of rolling foam,
And where your spirit
Sings the song of places
It has long known
How to roam.
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Attitudes of Gratitude
Photo: A.L.
I chose to write this response to Dawn as a stream of consciousness piece. No edits. No pauses. No revisiting or rethinking or rephrasing. Typos and mismatched sentences and mixed metaphors and all. It is what it is. And so it is. Here goes, some ten things I am grateful for.
- You. I am thankful for all of you whom I met in the blog-lands in 2019, and for those I’d met before but got to know better in 2019. I’m thankful for the glorious, tender, poetic, empathic, wise, witty, funny, delightful, mysterious things you write and post and share. For all of you who love. For all of you I love. For the kindness shown to me.
- Kindness. I cannot overemphasize how grateful I am for kindness. For the big things people do for each other, yes. Opening one’s home to the needy. Giving of what one has enough of to those who do not. Going all out for someone else. Yes. All that. But also for the seemingly small acts of kindness: Holding the door for someone, making eye contact and smiling, paying for someone’s coffee, carrying someone’s groceries to the car, babysitting someone’s child so they can have a moment for themselves, clearing snow from someone else’s car, slowing down at the street crossing so someone who is slower or frail does not need to feel rushed lest the light changes before they are on the other side, being the driver who waits patiently till that slow-crosser gets safely to the other side … It all matters. Especially now.
- Connection. Through the big and small acts of kindness. Through the words we say and the things we do and the words we don’t say and the things we could’ve done and decided not to, because it was the better thing to do to refrain. To think not only of the immediate gratification but the long term realities of who we are and what we want to know about our own choices.
- Choices. For being able to have them. For being able to exercise them. For being able to know what they are and not take them for granted. For remembering those who fought for them and taking on the charge of fighting to help those who have far less choice, so they, too, have the choices they should have.
- Patience. Am grateful for learning a bit more of it. For knowing I’ve got more to learn and that I can take the time to become better at it. Patience with others who don’t see as I do. Patience with others who need me to see as they do and even if they have a difficult time accepting I do not see eye to eye with them and likely won’t, and yet that it is okay to disagree and no one needs to feel as if they’d lost face or have less worth. Patience with the things that take time that I don’t always feel I have. Patience with myself, especially. With my body’s limitations. With others’ human limitations. With the realities of pain and the cost of histories and with the urgency to know what the future holds, even if I know I can’t.
- The future. Grateful for the opportunity to work toward one. To be part of what change can be done that may help ensure the next generations will have one. To be part of believing that good matters and action matters and small choices matter, and that together we can be more light than doom, more responsible than victimizing, more repairing than damaging.
- Repair. Am grateful for the trust placed in each breath we breathe. For the potential to repair: relationships, the fractures of mistakes, the misunderstandings that come with complicated communications and different points of views and variations on information and the tug and pull of forces that may wish to harm, but we need not succumb to. Because we are better than that, and stronger at the seams of our repair. For the potential to hold hope and action for the repair of some aspects of this Earth, too.
- Hope. I am deeply, deeply, deeply thankful for hope.
- Children. I cannot imagine this world without them. There would be no world without them. They represent, embody, live, breathe, exude hope.
- Love, and the power of voice. I know. Two in one. For they are often one. Written, spoken, expressed love and voice. The kind that comes through in actions, in thoughts, in educating, in offering help, in wisdom, in words, in gestures, in the myriad ways that make us who we are. And help us grow.
May every day in 2020 — and in the decade unfurling, new and brimming with what can be still be born — bring us all that we are grateful for. And the courage and power and strength and stamina and magic to dream and trust and do and move beyond.
With a heart full of tremulousness and gratitude,
Na’ama.
(Adding here a link to last year’s list. Because it made me smile to read it. I’m quite predictable to myself, I am. I am.)
For Dawn’s “The 2019 Attitude of Gratitude List”
Na'ama Yehuda 
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