When in doubt …
Uncertainty, shock, worry, grief …
Slow down. Take time.
Be still.
Make space. Breathe more.
Love more.
Hug more.
Hold on. Hold close.
Be.
You.
Reflections
Day of The Girl
Speak up for every girl.
For every woman, child.
For those who never had a say
Or book, or pen in hand.
Speak up for every girl
Who was shut up from choice
For every girl whose culture robbed
From future full of hope.
Speak up for girls who have no school
Who’re married before time,
Who men control with fear and pain
In violence, man-prowl, crime.
Speak up for every woman, child,
Trafficked, sold off, bound
For every one who’d been demeaned
Silenced, pushed around.
Speak up for girls who do not earn
Fair wages for fair work
Speak up for giving girls a voice
For futures they can mold.
Speak up so no more men teach boys
That women can be groped.
Speak up so no more women believe
Such men cannot be stopped.
Speak up for every girl who thinks
No one will care to know
Who worries rape will be about
Her face, her clothes, her fault.
Speak up so every girl
Can have a safe return.
From classrooms, boardrooms, wells.
So every child is free to be
To write, to talk, to tell.
Speak up for women everywhere
From girlhood throughout life
For mothers, sisters, neighbors, wives.
Speak up.
Speak up.
Speak up.
Malala Yousafzai
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What if bad people forgot how to be bad? (An irreverent fantasy)
I was walking home from a meeting the other day and ran into an elderly woman with a walker and a broken umbrella. She looked lost.
I asked her if she was okay, and she shook her head. She couldn’t remember where she was going, then brightened slightly: she had a card. She dug around in her purse, broken umbrella perched over one shoulder and rain drenching her head, keys and change spilling onto the wet pavement. I held my umbrella over her, picked up the fallen items and looked at the card she held out: A senior center. I knew which one–it was quite a ways away. How did she end up so far from it?
She’d been trying to get there and must’ve taken a wrong turn. Got lost. She was flustered–she’s lived in the area a long time but couldn’t get herself oriented to what avenue was where or in what order or how far. She kept repeating an attribute of her destination. A ramp. For wheelchairs and walkers. It had a ramp. She’d been walking and looking for ramps…
I told her not to worry. I knew where she had to go and would walk her there.
On the way and as she looked for ramps and we slowly navigated in the rain that dripped over the edge of her broken umbrella and as we dodged puddles and splashing cars and potholes that snagged the wheels of her walker, she told me (and repeated the same every minute or so) she has “some dementia.” She used to be very independent and “drive all over the place” but now keeps getting confused. She said she tries to leave the house to be with people because “it is important” and because otherwise she sits home alone “and cries like a baby all day.”
My heart ached for her.
Her broken umbrella mirrored her flickering brain–she held on though it barely did what it ought to.
It took us a while to inch our way to the senior center. I kept reassuring her we’ll find the center (with the ramp). She retold me of her dementia. How independent she used to be. Of her forgetting. Her wanting to be with people. Her “crying like a baby” at home.
After I left this sweet lady safe and sound at the center (with the ramp–she was so delighted to see that ramp! Its presence a small proof of her memory still holding on to something!), I walked home and couldn’t help thinking … Wouldn’t it be helpful if instead of this little old lady, some of those who thrive on cruel manipulation, got a touch of dementia?
Irreverent simplicity.
Oh, dementia is no joke, and I did not and do not intend to trivialize it!
Nonetheless I found myself considering how safer our world would be if those who connive to hurt and harm, forgot how to … and instead became immersed in small-radius-activities of afternoon bingo and word-searches. If tyrants and terrorists of all types of violent intrusions, lost interest in victimizing or power-hunger, and instead had their world contract around organized daily existences in protective housing someplace … to be occupied with lunch and naps and no longer be capable of manipulation and scheming …
Just saying.
They would be a far more deserving audience for a bit of dementia, than this sweet woman and so many the world over whose full heart and intellect we can use.
Wouldn’t it be helpful, I thought, to have the wish-to-harm turn dull in those who relish spreading agony?
At least until the shuttle to Pluto was ready …
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Pictures on Pavement
Shirley Baker children draw on pavement France 1960
Find time for drawing
Pictures
On the pavement of your mind.
Remember
The dry feel of chalk on fingers
The odd satisfaction in
Colors
Merging in the rain.
Put aside the rush of feet
The soles of to-do lists
The pressures of perfection.
Pavement pictures do not require
Standards
Other than imagination and
A bit of emptiness,
A soft rock,
A hand.
Make room for pavement pictures
On the pace-space
Of your mind.
Let the squiggles free
So the sketch
You never knew was there
Could stretch
A doodle
To the sun.
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Mothering
Thankful
For mothering
In all its forms:
The immediate, the early, the continuous, the delayed;
The biological, the fostered, the adopted, the periodical, the incremental and the unusual;
To mothering by women, by men, by friends and neighbors, co-workers and teachers, siblings and relatives, by the kind smile of a stranger and moments of shared understanding;
To mothering by nature, by pets, by ocean waves, by breath and life’s constant flow and ebb;
To Mother Earth and Mother Moon;
To mothering of self, by self, by growth, by age and lessons learned and known …
To all of this, and more;
Thankful for mothering.
In all its forms.
Note: all photos are taken from Pintrest. If you know their original provenance I’ll be happy to add specific credits!
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Find Freedom
- Photo: http://www.countryliving.com/gardening/garden-tours/
Find freedom in whatever small measures of peace you can.
It is yours for the freeing, yours for the making, your for the taking:
Freedom from stress, from strain, from hand-wringing worry;
Freedom from old tapes and older boxes;
Freedom from stale words and staler habits;
Freedom from harsh realities;
Freedom from histories repeated;
Freedom from bloated egos, punctured dreams, blame, sorrow;
Freedom from more-to-do-than-possible; unrealistic expectations;
Freedom from judgment–inside and out and in between;
Freedom from hate–it is not of you, never was.
Find freedom
In each breath. Each perfect petal of a flower, each song of bird;
In every new life born; all promise, all potential;
In everything you are, and everything you always had been,
but maybe forgot.
Find freedom in whatever small measures of peace around you.
It will grow.
For freedom expands like light in a mirror; multiplied.
You know.
Photo Credit: A.Asif
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Find peace
Find peace in quiet nature
Find peace in small things born
Find peace in flowers after winter
Find peace in green shoots grown
Find peace in human kindness
Find peace in life galore
Find peace in colors blooming
Find peace in blue-green shores
Find peace in sunshine streaming
Find peace in mornings’ glow
Find peace in smiles unexpected
Find peace in rivers’ flow
Find peace in children’s laughter
And hope in hearts who know.
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Spring Balance
The vernal equinox greencolander
Balance … that point of perfect stillness …the place of pause between the inhalation and the exhalation … the being in (yep, it would flicker) peace …
We seek balance. We crave and hope and workshop and self-help and click on links for it … We want balance yet all too often forget it is only a passing blip on life’s experiential radar screen. Rather than suspended animation, balance is a state of never ending mini-bobbles, of constant readjusting, of rolling with the punches, of going with the flow.
How paradoxical that balance is unsteady. It calls on every sense to be alert for small corrections, on perceptions to be both relaxed and sharpened.
Yet it is not a paradox. Not really. Complete stillness isn’t balance–it is frozen. It immobilizes. Holds down, prevents change.
Life flows, and we’re at our best when we are most aware and without anxiousness. We are most balanced when we’re in the moment, in the wobble, readjusting; undeterred.
Nature is as always, a most persistent teacher. It demonstrates balance twice a year. Points of pause from which to slow or quicken; momentary balance to remind us of how all stillness shifts; how balance IS the shifting.
Nature pauses in perfect timing … For as we move from winter sluggishness to the rapid march of spring; balance can seem suddenly untenable: how does one possibly do all there is to do, attend to all that’s going on–with ourselves, our families, our job, our countries, our world ….? How does one catch up with the riotous and springy energies?
The very point of stillness into seasons’ change, reminds us that like everything, we are also called to flow … adjust, keep boundaries, recalibrate yet not stop; swim the current but not be carried over and bashed by white waters; harness new potential and use it for growth, rather than destruction. We are reminded to let go not into helplessness but to a gentle bobble-wobble.
Nature also reminds us that we need to breathe. To play. To laugh. To live in the moment. To watch children and babies–so much new life opens in rebirth–and learn from their unrelenting exuberance even as we also learn from the unwavering subtle protection of good mothers who allow young minds to be both curious and safe.
It is in the small beats of life–the pause between the whoosh-whoosh of your heart, the stillness in the pendulum before it resumes movement, the perfect balance of the light and darkness–that all potential lives.
May you spring in balance. May balance bring more spring into your step.
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Pathways to Hope
In times of much uncertainty,
It can be hard to see a path
Worth taking.
A walk unencumbered by darkness or demise
Might seem improbable
Potential tarnished
Possibility destroyed.
For there is so much vitriol. Fear-mongering. Divisiveness. Incitement.
There may seem no way worthy.
No path available; a future bleak with war.
There’s hope, however, in paths semi-forgotten
In steps untrodden
In walkways hidden under heaps of misdirection, worry, mirrors, smoke.
There are sturdy lanes to follow.
Not the blathering ones cluttered with false promises or empty bravado
But the ones one forges
With their soul.
These paths, too, are waiting
Ever present, patient, true to form.
In a time when paths seem blocked
Futures sold to the highest bidder
The loudest, richest, most shocking
To the very wrong …
There are still avenues
Unmarred,
Open vistas
Brimming with
Clear breath
Kindness
Real growth.
So if you find the path a-twisted
If you feel the weight of futures crucial to avoid,
Step yourself away from highways-into-nothing
And take instead a quiet stroll
Into your soul.
Find solitude
Hold empathy
Recall respect for all that is,
The Truths that make life possible:
Compassion, not destruction
An open heart
The step by steps which widens futures
To allow companionship
Acceptance
The brilliance woven into threads of love
For tapestries of hope.
Na'ama Yehuda 
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