Before you lash out,
Hesitate.
Before you wit your words to punch,
Take pause.
Before you bully to submission
Before you weave a snarky thread
To tie another’s tongue
Before you bask in righteous indignation
Before you bathe in perceived superiority
Of color
Nationality
Views
Beliefs
Affiliation
Possessions
Excess …
Breathe a moment
To consider
And re-assess
The empty value
The pseudo-justification
In power used
To inflict hurt.
For The Daily Post
There’s a quickening of energies around the world.
Like all currencies, energy itself is neutral–it is what’s attached to it and how it is used that qualifies it into positive or not so, into what builds or what destroys, what mends or inflicts more wounding.
The Earth itself still rotates in the same general blinding speed it had for millennia too numerous to grasp. It hurtles through dark space with indescribable abandon, tethered by invisible forces to the star that keeps us all alive.
The overall mechanics of life and gravity hasn’t changed. Our awareness of it may have. Should.
With energies accelerated, we feel the rushed pulse of days, sometimes of mere moments. We sense the rotation of possibility, the immense power that can be harnessed, the twirl of time.
All is moving, quickened by both ignorance and understanding.
What we do with it–with the potential–is up to us.
Do we let slip down the slippery slopes of power-hunger, fear, and divisiveness … or do we harness good to raise our mutual consciousness, our moral compass, our social empathy to the reality that we are and always have been, One?
Do we take the historically familiar roads of vilifying those we do not care to get to know, of quantifying suffering of others as less painful and less necessary to end … Or do we truly recognize that hunger is still hunger, pain is pain, sorrow is more sorrow, that hate and violence beget only more of same? Do we resolve to do differently, not ‘again’ but in new ways?
Life has quickened. Bits of information spin around the globe in speeds now faster than the Earth itself. We are no longer separated by illusion.
Open eyes see clearly now.
We can, should, understand:
All. Is. One.
For The Daily Post
At the center of everything,
There’s heartbeat
And love.
At the center of everything,
Live intention
And compassion.
The currencies
Of empathy and growth,
The misty breath
Of light
Amidst the chaos.
At the center of everything,
Spin the threads that weave
Together
Soul and healing
Breadth and scope,
Into a tapestry
Of freedom
Peace and
Hope.
For The Daily Post
Even in a lifeless crag
Amidst a desert
Ragged rock
There’s proof of breath
Long gone
Still strong.
Fossil (Photo by A. Asif)
For The Daily Post
A Perfect Match: Photo by Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
I love this photo by my niece of her little boy and his uncle’s dog taking a walk on the beach. It encapsulates a tapestry of perfect pairings: sunset and beach, beach and dog, dog and boy, boy and beach, water and light, trepidation and trust.
The soft waves lap at the figures. Both child’s and canine’s play contained by a still-forming bond.
The silvery light with its promise of blush, the speck of island in the distance …
The footprints and shadow on the wet sand behind …
The image is a salve of contented quiet and hopeful calm.
For the Photo Challenge
His face gave him away.
Guilt wrote itself into every centimeter of his little visage. It colored his cheeks cherry and turned his lips downwards and his eyes up and away. He pressed his lips together to prevent admission. Tucked his hands deep into his pockets, one fist bulging in a telltale sign of something hidden.
Or not so well hidden.
I raised an eyebrow, more amusement than ire.
“I didn’t take anything,” he blurted.
My eyebrow climbed along with a corner of my mouth.
The four-year-old’s eyes darted down his arm, eyes magnetized by a conflicted conscience. “I don’t have anything in my hand …”
“I see …” I noted.
His looked up at me in alarm and the cherries on his cheeks bloomed beet.
“But …?” he examined the opaque fabric of his pants before exclaiming in half-question, half-fact: “Oh, you have magic eyes!?”
His little chest sighed and he pulled his hand out, candy clutched in guilty fingers. “I … I didn’t take it. … Uh … I only did … um … can I have one?”
For The Daily Post
Photo by: A. Barlev
They walk the line as morning comes
As new day draws its dawn,
They walk as night approaches close
And sunset sinks alone.
They walk the line of now and then
Of sand and rock, death, growth,
They walk as footsteps mark the soil
And press it deep with hope.
They walk where many walked before
With others not yet born,
They walk in dust of those who passed
Of stories told and torn.
They walk to sew new roads to life
Connections old as time,
They walk a line of young and old
Their hearts as close as mine.
For The Daily Post
“Hello darkness,
My old friend,
I’ve come to talk to you again …”
The song plays incessantly in my head, sparked awake by the words of a pre-teen who shared her nighttime worries with me.
She finds it difficult to sleep. Her ears strain to pick up any errant sound: A car’s brakes, a slammed door, people’s voices, steps, a distant bark. She’s afraid they’ve come.
She’s been told she shouldn’t worry. She’s done nothing wrong. Yet there are those who hadn’t, and still had loved ones taken. And she’s not from here. Not really. Not from birth, anyway.
What if the rules change and she’s deemed “returnable”?
What if they keep her away from her parents, send her back to where she’d come from? What if she cannot find the words, if they not let her explain that she is finally, finally, home?
She lies in bed at night. Listening. Making and discarding plans. Fretting in the dark.
Maybe she’ll hide. But where? Someone at school said they sometimes have dogs. She loves dogs. Police dogs — beautiful and focused and proud — never used to scare her. They do now. At their handlers’ command, they can hunt her down. She’s seen it. On TV. In her mind. Now her dreams.
“I listen to the sounds in the silence,” she whispered, eyes bright. “And I wait. Even in my dreams, I listen … and I cry when they come.”
For The Daily Post
He plopped himself on the rug and pulled his sock on, tugging on the elastic till the fabric stretched to his knees. He gazed down at a bump. Scrunched his forehead, patted the bump down. It flattened but not all the way.
The furrows in his forehead grew. The bumpy bit was connected to the sock … like always … but something still seemed wrong.
He twisted his foot. Examined the sole. No bump there.
He pulled harder on the elastic. Re-examined. No change.
He shrugged.
Somehow when mommy or daddy did this, the sock looked different. No bump on the bottom. No bump on top.
He stood, took a step and stopped. Another step. Stopped.
The bump bunched. It felt funny when he walked.
He sat back down. Stared at his feet. Wiggled his toes.
It felt funny again. He bent his foot. No good.
Maybe the sock was broken.
He pulled it off.
Took a look.
The sock appeared completely normal now. Just like always.
He pursed his lips, pointed his toes into the sock and tried again.
The fabric bunched. A bump.
He moved his foot, paused, narrowed his eyes, and sighed. Tugged the sock off and held it between thumb and finger.
“Be good boy, Sock,” he admonished. “No more no-sense. I mean it!”
Photo by: agirlnamedpj.com
For The Daily Post
May you live life lushly.
May new life, both the organized and the wonderfully wild,
Find purchase in your soul
To grow
And feed
Your whole.
Orly Fuchs Galchen @ Dalia, Feb 2017
This photo of contrasting verdurous fields is by my wonderfully talented childhood friend and artist Orly Fuchs Galchen. (We’ve known each other since 6th Grade!)
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