Solstice

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.

Mary Oliver,  What Can I Say

Movements of blossoming

I believe deeply that the seasons have a great deal of spiritual wisdom to offer us if we make space to listen. They teach us of the cycles and seasons of the earth and of our own lives. We are invited into the movements of blossoming, fullness, letting go, and rest, over and over again. Just like the lunar cycles of the moon’s waxing and waning, so too does the body of the earth call us into this healing rhythm. As the northern hemisphere enters the season of blossoming we are called to tend the places of our lives that still long for winter’s stillness as well as those places ready to burst forth into the world in a profusion of color. It takes time to see and listen. Around us the world is exploding in a celebration of new life, and we may miss much of it in our seriousness to get the important things of life done.

Christine Valters Paintner, Abbey of the Arts

Celebrate

Spring and all its flowers now
joyously break their vow of silence.
It is time for
celebration, not for
lying low.

Hafiz

Resilience

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Jane Hirshfield, Optimism

Familiar moments

Beautiful summer mornings here these last few days…

But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,

and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds
with the wooden spoon, I remembered,

this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture
after gesture, what else can we know of safety

or of fruitfulness? 

Marie Howe, From Nowhere

Natural goodness

We have a thrifty God,

who lets nothing that is good within us

ever go to waste

Sr Wendy Beckett