When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.
—Howard Thurman
Merry Christmas!
Continue reading “Back With Their Flocks”
There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years.
Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars.
Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It’s hard to live in all those kinds of times.
Easy to forget that you live in all of them.
Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
“I’m afraid of getting older”, that’s what I learned to say
‘Cause society has given me the words to think that way.
The message spins and spirals, “Don’t get saggy, don’t get grey”
But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulders.
My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too
They wrinkle like the river, they sweeten like the dew
And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue.
How can beauty that is living be anything but true?
So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair,
Let me dance in front of people without a care.
—Incomprehensible, Big Thief
Happy birthday to me (from me).
Adopt the pace of Nature:
her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
You need distance, interval.
The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon.
The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Happy twelfth birthday to La Pêche Fraîche.
“A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things.
The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today.
Nature is an event that never stops.
As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed,
‘We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.’”
—Merlin Sheldrake
Humans are divided into different clans and tribes, and belong to countries and towns. But I find myself a stranger to all communities and belong to no settlement.
The universe is my country and the human family is my tribe.
—Khalil Gibran
You will never be able to escape from your heart.
So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.
—Paul Coelho, The Alchemist
Happy Valentine’s Day!…
“Memory commits you to the nuance; the fog.
If you act on memory you commit yourself on the basis of echoes: unpredictable, faint, fading even as they were generated.
No basis on which to inch out across your life, and yet all you have.”
—M. John Harrison
