Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

May28

remember

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Today is Memorial Day.

what do you remember?

I remember the touch of my mother’s hand,

my exuberant father,

the feel of my cat’s Balthazar’s long body

draped over my shoulder.

The smell of a peony from this morning,

the shape of my daughter’s back

(she is singing now

and I am remembering song after song

sung for me, with me).

I remember the raucous laughter of

my South Dakota relatives

down on the farm,

the feel of Capprichio’s nose on my lips.

I remember my own dancing,

my own wild heart.

We are supposed to remember

the fallen on this day.

Besides those friends and strangers,

we must remember to

appreciate all of it –

what is here today, just now

one delicious moment at a time.

 

 

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May25

appreciation

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Every day I get an email from my friend Carol Hinson.  It is a list.  The first part of the list is what she is grateful for.  The second part of the list is what she is attracting and manifesting.  Carol does not write a blog or have a website, but everyday she does this simple practice.  Many times I don’t know the specific people that she is referring to.  It doesn’t matter.  What I do get is her devotion in writing down and sharing her list every single day.

This morning I started reading Andrew Harvey’s book, The Hope:  A Guide to Sacred Activism.  In the first chapter he gives suggestions for ten things we can do right now to put ourselves on the path of being a spiritual activist.  The first  is to write down one thing that made you be grateful to be alive today.  The second is to write down ten things that you would say are sacred to you today.  His list for that day included cats.  Excellent, I thought.

I prefer the word appreciation to gratitude.  Gratitude has always felt a little sticky to me, with an overtone of the religious.  Appreciation feels clean and penetrable – like there is nothing in the way of fully drenching myself into the thing that I am appreciating.

So today I am especially appreciating Carol and her daily list and the fact that I receive it.  And here is my list of ten things that I would say are sacred today:

  1. the iris and peonies in my garden (and other’s gardens)
  2. my daughters
  3. my wife Pam
  4. the mockingbird outside my window all day
  5. horses
  6. dancing
  7. the deep and variegated greens of the spring
  8. Nepal, the birthplace of my daughters
  9. the writings of Jon Katz
  10. the poetry of Mary Oliver & Rumi

That’s ten.  I could go on.  But that is just today and tomorrow my list will be different in some ways, the same in others.  And I can’t leave without sharing this from Abraham:

Let your dominant intent be to feel good which means be playful, have fun, laugh often, look for reasons to appreciate and practice the art of appreciation. And as you practice it, the Universe, who has been watching you practice, will give you constant opportunities to express it. So that your life just gets better and better and better.

 

 

 

May24

make of yourself a light

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The Buddha’s Last Instruction

 “Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~ (House of Light)