Tag: Courage

Once the door is opened

 

Admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clear air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim,
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain
who helped to make it.

 

Doors — They begin an adventure. They end a long day.

Doors — They stand open to call us toward a time of growth. They slowly close to create a space for quiet when it’s time to gather and reflect.

Today, I sit at a door. Today, I welcome a new year… My 65th. It is a day to pause. I never imagined what it would be like to reach this birthday. As a person with a disability, it is a challenge to plan for the future because so many things can come up along the way. Yet, here I am at 65 – healthy, able to pursue my interests, and still full of curiosity.

There have been adventures leading to this birthday and there will be adventures following this birthday. I greet each like a new door, calling me to trust as I move over its threshold.

I celebrate this day with gratitude and look ahead with anticipation.

From Mameen in David Whyte: Essentials
Many Rivers Press © David Whyte

Never Give Up

Fragile as a spider’s web
Hanging in space
Between tall grasses,
It is torn again and again.
A passing dog
Or simply the wind can do it.
Several times a day
– gather myself together
And spin it again.
Spiders are patient weavers.
They never give up.
And who knows
What keeps them at it?
Hunger, no doubt,
And hope.

Quote: May Sarton, “Love” in “Poems between Women: Four Centuries of Love, Romantic Friendship, and Desire” complied by Emma Donoghue (Columbia University; January 1, 1997)

Photo by Bence Balla-Schottner on Unsplash

Quote from DK (Tumbler)

… in sunshine and in shadow…

Photo by Hatice Baran:

Be at peace today. Even if it is one of your worst days: be at peace. What hurts us will one day cease. What worries us will be resolved. What we long for will be revealed. Even if we are engaged in a great struggle right now, we can be at peace in our mind and heart through the Spirit, for life is more than what limits us. There is an endless love surrounding us, broader and deeper than any ocean. There is beauty and hope and healing. There is change and there is renewal. Remember this promise in sunshine and in shadow. And be at peace. Be at peace today.

Gratefula for the wise ones in our midst. Today’s reflection by Stephen Charleston.

A beginning and an end…

an entry from a friend- I share in honor of David’s vision and Buechner’s life… (Live and Learn- David Kanigan)

 

5:10 a.m. No. I didn’t sleep in. And No, I didn’t take magnesium before bed. Or drink a cup of Tonic Water. Or eat a banana. Or take melatonin. Why? Who the Hll knows? Maybe it gives me something to btch about.

I walk.

It has been 837 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. That’s 2 years, 3 months, 15 days, like in a row.

There’s a thin sheen of cloud cover over the moon. Even God found at Ōita couldn’t get a clear shot at this. Elsewhere overhead, the cloud cover is heavy and near complete. It’s dark.

It feels like a “down” day. Too much cloud. Too many people. Too much high tide.  Sigh. 837 days, and you’re going to have an off day. The odds are such.

I approach the location in the photograph up top.  A scene that I, and you, have seen many times.

I can make out the fisherman’s silhouette, but nothing else.  Something pulls me to lift the camera up and look through the viewfinder…WTH is that? I stare through the viewfinder, a Kaleidoscope.

I take the camera away and look out again. It’s dark. I see nothing of what I see in the viewfinder.  I lift the camera, and do over. God, no. It can’t be my eyes deteriorating further.

I lift the camera again, and sure as sh*t, it’s there. God found at Ōita has returned. The pink hue watercolors are airbrushed on the water, the sky, the low hanging clouds and the horizon.

It’s dark, and yet it’s not.  What I see. What I want to see. What I can see. What I don’t see. What I feel.

This string of babble pulls me back to my early morning papers.

Frederick Buechner died this week.  David Brooks, in his must-read essay titled “The Man Who Found His Inner Depths” described Buechner’s faith as “personal, unpretentious and accessible. ‘Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward.’ It is sensing a presence, not buying an argument.”

I look over the Cove, it’s lighter out now, twilight is lifting. Now that I see, I believe.

But damn it if I’m not sensing Something out there.

Something ethereal, Lori’s magic word def. adj. //əˈTHirēəl/ extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world.

No, this brick-head isn’t buying ‘jack’ yet, but he’s out Shopping, and Something is there.

He can feel it. 

DK Photo @ 5:30 a.m. August 20, 2022. 8-° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.

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