All days are sacred days to wake New gladness in the sunny air. Only a night from old to new; Only a sleep from night to morn. The new is but the old come true; Each sunrise sees a new year born. ~Helen Hunt Jackson from “New Year’s Morning”
We awake glad,
breathe deeply of the sacred around us
glistening in the light of a soft sunrise.
Each day is a fresh start,
a gift from beyond,
content to renew covenant
with God and one another.
Let this day’s air praise the Lord— Rinsed with gold, endless, walking the fields, Blue and bearing the clouds like censers, Holding the sun like a single note Running through all things, a basso profundo Rousing the birds to an endless chorus.
Now, shout from the stomach, hoarse with music, Give gladness and joy back to the Lord, Who, sly as a milkweed, takes root in your heart. ~Robert Siegel
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photo by Starla Smit
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The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain —
They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart,
they work the brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
And savage the helpless trees.What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the rush of the wild sunrise? ~William Ernest Henley from “The Rain and the Wind”
Yesterday a calm and steady rain
made more sodden a sullen gray dawn
when unbidden, a sudden gust
ripped loose remaining leaves
and sent them spinning,
swirling earthbound
in yellow clouds.
The battering of rain and wind
left no doubt
summer is done for good —
the past is past.
I hunker through the turbulenceto await a clear night when once again
heaven empties itself into
a fragile crystalline dawn.
Be comforted; the world is very old, Â And generations pass, as they have passed, Â A troop of shadows moving with the sun; Thousands of times has the old tale been told; Â The world belongs to those who come the last, Â They will find hope and strength as we have done. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “A Shadow”
The shadow’s the thing. If I no longer see shadows as “dark marks,” as do the newly sighted, then I see them as making some sort of sense of the light. They give the light distance; they put it in its place. They inform my eyes of my location here, here O Israel
,here in the world’s flawed sculpture, here in the flickering shade of the nothingness between me and the light. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground. ~Victor Hugo from Les Miserables
Now a red, sleepy sun above the rim Of twilight stares along the quiet weald, And the kind, simple country shines revealed In solitudes of peace, no longer dim. The old horse lifts his face and thanks the light, Then stretches down his head to crop the green. All things that he has loved are in his sight; The places where his happiness has been Are in his eyes, his heart, and they are good. ~Siegfried Sassoon from “Break of Day”
Heaven and earth are only three feet apart,
but in the thin places that distance is even smaller.
A thin place is where the veil that separates heaven and earth is lifted
and one is able to receive a glimpse of the glory of God.
~Celtic saying
“…the sky flames, more intense. I didn’t see it coming.” ~Patricia Hooper, from “Equinox”
…the autumn is deep. Its pitch is only beginning, and will brighten before the end. Brighten into darkness, or into spring. ~Pamela Steed Hill from “September Pitch”
Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.
~Hafez, Persian poet
When my heart clenches with sadness, when my thinking is muddled with stress and doubting, when I can’t focus on what is right before me because tears cloud my vision, I remember one thing remains clear in the mist and midst of the fog.
I have need for God and I am softened in my neediness.
sunrise blessing on January 27, 2014 from the farm — a photo progression
The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain —
The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain —
Heaven and earth are only three feet apart,
“…the sky flames, more intense.
…the autumn is deep.
Barnstorming 