First my page, then Helen Macdonald’s.
This paragraph came at the end of a much longer piece about illness and caregiving:
The copper beech branches outside claw at the sky, barren but for a few tattered leaves. But even a tattered leaf speaks to season — one jiggling a little message in the bitter breeze this morning. All I have to do to find redemption — serious, nervous-system, Holy Spirit kind of redemption — is lift my head and look out the window. Blue jays my best teachers. Squirrels and puddles and scarlet holly berries, too.
* Bird sculpture by Maggie Rose.
💗🥰 forest 🌳🦌
When I feel that it is all getting away from me, that is the time that I step outside, take a deep breath, look skyward, look downward, see the offerings of the land and somehow, it always seems that I feel an embrace, a pat on the shoulder that seems to say, hold still, quiet yourself, breathe deeply, look not just with your eyes, simply BE…
Yes! Even when winter isn’t quite what I expect (and for alarming reasons), the earth and sky offer solace and expansive recharge.
I’ve just come from Jude’s Spirit Cloth (https://spiritcloth.typepad.com/spirit_cloth/2021/01/shifting-perspective.html) with its image of a tree “barren but for a few tattered leaves” … leaves as eyes as leaves … or so it seemed to me
I so value this ether-real synchronicity … and “All I have to do to find redemption — serious, nervous-system, Holy Spirit kind of redemption — is lift my head and look out the window”
It is really remarkable how that happens and keeps happening. I wrote those words in ink on the page last Thursday.
Beautiful writings, thank you. Staring at the trees and watching the birds has brought much comfort this year. Right now the chickadees and juncos outside the window…tiny flittering reminders of lightness and other worlds.
I don’t think we have juncos around here? Maybe I’m wrong. The feeders offer small windows into the the life’s of birds, don’t they?
Food for thought Dee. I’ve been watching the few remaining leaves on the huge Sycamore tree across the way, tremble on the vicious winds…herds of other leaves blow across the 3 story rooftop, in a hurry to get somewhere. Power is out in other places of the valley, but we’re good and cozy.
(((Dee))) beautiful thoughts, there is much hope now that we are here in 2021 with vaccines being made available & the US about to move into a more hopeful time with the inauguration of Biden & Harris. Our beautiful broken world is in need of the paradigm shift away from the will of greedy abuse into a heart centred compassionate and caring biocentric world which you & I and so many others have worked towards all our lives, a huge step will be when humanity agrees to make ecocide a crime. I still dream of a world where love is the answer, love for our earth and all it’s forms always has been and always will be the answer but by gosh there’s been some dark times of late as the dinosaurs of the fossil fuel industries try to hang on to their profits. There is so much happening with renewable energies, electric cars, recognizing the rights of rivers and mountains and in this post colonial era the need for honouring all the indigenous people worldwide who had their lands stolen in the colonial era. So many positive changes have and are happening in our lifetimes, this gives me great hope on even the darkest days.
Yes yes and yes. I love that climate crisis is not a side bar with Biden. Not a footnote. And neither is racism. He is appointing good people, too.
Off the page, but on the mark, just now, I watched a special report on the TV: . A memorial for Covid-victims has been held at the Lincoln Memorail Reflecting Pool, first time that it has bee nlit. I have candles in my windows. President Biden, Mrs. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, her husband…a nurse who works with Covid patients who sings at work, sang a capella Amazing Grace and then Yolanda Adams sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah …this was the first event of the Biden administration. Hearts and hope rising and my heart is so full..
Recorded and about to watch now.
I watched too. So very very much has been missing.
stayed up to see the pardon list. came here to be outraged if unsurprised about bannon. could have been worse. loved your title riffing on the cognitive test the other day. Have been on that level for awhile but starting to pull out of it.
love the inter-communication with nature imagery in your writing snippet …
Hi Acey. Have some catching up to do on your blog. But I have enjoyed the catalogue of yellow flowers.
I read it the first day it posted. ~Saffron, Melody, July all flashed through my thoughts~ how the connection to the young poet must have resonated for you.
Yes. The passage about her purchase was so moving in Kendi’s book. I already knew a bit of her story but this was very granular and vivid.