Prickly Pear; Photo: A. Asif
May you find ample nourishment
In unforeseen places
And may your palate discern
True potential
Even amidst
Prickly spines.
May the sun warm your heart
Like a rain in the desert
To ripen fruits so refined
That they feed
All your needs
And your soul
Once again
Realigns.
For The Daily Post
May the bud of hope bloom on
To flower large
Inside your heart
And set your soul to blossom
Wide
Throughout your mind.
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!)
On this longest night:
Spread light.
In this shortest day,
Of briefest sun
Of darkest dark:
Take heart
Be kind
Live love
Hug tight.
Photo Credit: A.A.
May it be a year of peace
A year of calm
A year of heart
Of reason.
May it be a year of kindness
Of compassion
Of humanity and understanding.
May it be a year of healing
For this Mother Earth
And all who are together on it.
May it be a year of wisdom
Of light over darkness
Love over hate
Acceptance over ignorance
Courage over fear.
May it be the year where violence recedes
Where patience and respect for one another
Become more valued
Than greed
And need for power.
May it be a year of history remembered
Not repeated.
A year of repair
Not more destruction
Of healing
Not added wounding.
May it be a year where we truly do
Value the future
Of our children
Of humanity
This planet home.
May it be
A happy new year.
A year of joy
Where we could know
Each day by blessed day
That we the people
Are finally
Together
Finding our way.
As summer solstice arrives, I find myself wondering about the metaphoric increase of light and the ongoing balance of light and dark, the constant shifting from more of one to more of the other and the very brief points of apex on either. We are not meant to be static. Not the planet, not even within the same season–there is constant change. Even as summer formally begins, it begins the long path to the opposite.
Dark to me does not necessarily have the connotation of evil–though it can indeed also mean the absence of light on heart and soul levels–rather it often represents for me all that is hibernating, what is nascent and unborn, the things that await clarifying, the times of preparation, incubation, anticipation, hibernation, rest …
Dark carries in it the potential of enlightenment, the tender differentiation of color in pre-dawn, the realization of upcoming sunshine and the end of opaque unknown.
In the summer solstice, dark is at its shortest, but it is not eliminated, nor should it be. Without dark, there is no contrast. Without dark, it is difficult to find rest or space for incubating thought and creativity, for wonder and imagination, for small things needing sheltering still until they grow enough to face the light.
I am reminded of this as even in the longest day arrives, the path to increasing dark is already beginning–slow and steady from now to the winter solstice, a drop-by-drop addition to the night and its many potentials.
Don’t get me wrong, for all the sheltering potential of sapphire skies and starlit hours, I love long days. I adore the long twilight of summer evenings, the seemingly endless time to be outside in the sun. So much so that I remember wondering–as a child reading about another child’s life in Lapland–what it had to be like to live above the Arctic Circle in a summer of continuous light (only in the summer, please … the freezing cold is not something I am enamored with even considering …).
Someone I know swears by the healing properties of experiencing these dark-less days. She finds that it calibrates her body’s internal needs: she eats when hungry, sleeps when tired, works until the work is done. To her, a fortnight in the Arctic summer is a remedy for most that ails her.
Another friend who spent some of her childhood in Sweden told me that she loved it for the first two days then found it suffocating. “I’d hide under the bed and drape a blanket over the sides to get a place of darkness. I needed time to breathe some night. My brain wanted to rest.”
I can understand both the freedom that a time of continuous light allows, and the need for respite from it. For all the adoration of light–and I indeed adore it–there is the inherent balance of all things. Even my friend who prescribes Arctic summers makes time for breaks from productivity.
A sage woman once told me: “We all seek the light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel itself has value in leading you to it.”
May this Summer Solstice become a day of balance for you. May it support your outward creativity and your inward incubation of new being and new doing. May it hold the hint of winter in the making–the cooling and the slower pace already forming.
Happy Summer Solstice to you.
And for all who celebrate it–also a Happy Father’s Day!
From Pintrest: thisenchantedpixie.org
Take a breath in the streaming rays
Feel the light fill up your days
Know the sun
The dappled warmth
Sense the earth supporting
verdant growth
Hear the wind whisper stories to the grass, the fronds, the palms
and
Find the space that holds your heart inside your calm.
From Pintrest: Thailand
May your day be rich with joy
immense in beauty
and exuberant
as cherry blossoms bloom!
from Pintrest
Photo by: anselmona
On the almost eve of a new year, may your path hold clear as you pass into the nascent potential of what is almost born to be. For it can be, in truth, all that there can be.
Not all newness smells of radical divergence. In every sense, all paths we take form in the footsteps of those we already walked. It is where we head, how we carry our present time and what we see as possible, that breathes new life into the future. Farmers toiled for centuries, building fences to clear fertile ground and to protect the livestock with the use of the very rocks that made obstacles for plows. Stones remained stones even as they have become all that and then some.
We, too, are what we always were … and then some. We are who we know to be and what we learned to do about it, how we join the paths of others, how we forge our own to clear ground for new growth (hopefully in compassionate persistence). We are how we build with what is there. How we tend to obstacles and plow potential. What we form within us and around us. How we become what we know.
May the path hold clear in sun and mist, in fog and rainbow. May it be.
§§§
Gateways:
Every gate you pass holds pathways
Of times walked through
Stone by stone.
Every passage holding steady
Leaning onto
All that’s gone.
Every walkthrough
Every newness
Wraps around the times you know.
All the pebbles
Rocks
Big Boulders
That held back
Allowed
Remembered
All that needed
Fought
To grow.
“I think life is moving too fast. I can’t keep up.”
My friend’s face on the chat’s screen was drawn. She has been through some hectic times. Her father fell and broke his hip two weeks before, cascading into issues that required not only the logistical reorganization of everyday life from an independent elder to someone who would not be likely to return to his home of 60 years; but also the emotional and psychological support for both herself and her father at this sudden change. An active retiree, her father was usually out and about, fishing, carpentering, flirting with a few old ladies at the retiree club he frequented. My friend lived only 15 minutes away, and visited often, but he rarely asked for her help. When he did, she suspected it was more as a point of connection and to let her “feel needed” than due to actual need for her assistance.
One burnt light-bulb later, and it all changed.
Life’s pace for both of them shifted. Her father’s life turned mostly idle, his days passing with him sedately in his bed, or at most in a wheelchair. Where he had counted months and weeks and days in plans and projects; he now counts hours as he waits for meals, physical therapy, and his daughter’s calls and visits. For my friend, life sped to calculating minutes into which to fit things. She juggles her job and two children, her home and preparing it for winter, the recent flooding of her basement, coordinating the care for her father, orthodontist appointments for one son, college applications for another, all while trying to manage the stress and grief and worry without losing so much sleep that she is no good in the morning.
Things do not let up. Her father is to be discharged from the nursing home very soon, and he will need a long term placement where he could continue to get care now that other systems in his body have decided to give in to old age. To top things off, she just found out there is a problem with her car that will require her to leave it for repairs for several days. The logistics of a simple car rental outdid her just the night before.
“I can’t keep up,” she stated, sadly shaking her head.
“Maybe you don’t need to–or at least, not with everything,” I suggested.
She glared at me a moment. Then her eyes softened–she knows I understand a bit about overwhelm. “How?” she asked, voice shaking now, maybe with just a hint of hope that there can be a way off of the roller-coaster and into calmer rides. “How, when it all needs to get done …”
We brainstormed, and she realized that she had accumulated quite a few vacation days. The original plan was to use the lot for a cross-country trip with her kids–and her father–but these plans may well change some anyway. It could do more good to take some of those days now. Even three days off would give her time to check out retirement-homes in the area without the stress of rushing from work to try and get catch administrators before they left for the day. It would allow her to learn more about the financial and logistical burdens her father will now face and what support can be made available. No less importantly–a few days off will give her just a bit of time for herself.
She decided to take four, luxuriating in the concept of creating time.
The realities to juggle did not change but her pace did. She found a way to slow it just a tad to give herself some sense of traction. Renting that car no longer seemed so daunting. She laughed that she would see if they had one in red, just because she always wanted do drive one that color. She friend relaxed just knowing there’d be an opportunity to catch up, pay bills, cook everyone’s favorite fall stew, drink her coffee sitting down, take a bubble bath.
“I forget,” she noted before we hung up our Skype connection. “I think so much about making sure everyone else has time to decompress, that I get squashed and do not notice until I am frantic.”
“So many of us do,” I told her. “I think this is where we can hold a mirror for one another and remind each other how to find a better pace.”
I am no longer worried about my friend. She found her balance, as she had helped me find my own once in a while. We do that for each other, calibrating pace.
Life rushes. We all rush on, attempting to catch up … But for today, may you find your best pace. A place to pause, a breather in the midst of life’s amazing and yet often tiring long race.
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