This beautiful and short poem summarizes the way to the New Year. Have a Blessed and safe New Year as we turn the page on 2013 and enter 2014,
Time for wrapping up
closing the book
and open the next
with untold stories
new adventures
a new dawn
is smiling
as dusk gathers around.
As I move into the New Year, this poem resonated. Being more mindful, allows me to be aware of the needed balance between passion and compassion. Life has a way of revealing a path when I am patient and open to multiple possibilities.
A mindful attitude–
Seek to choose well
Blend fiery passion
With compassion’s loving kindness.
Let life’s fruit mature;
Ripen deeply
Nurture life’s fully.
A spiritual banquet nourishes
Deepest meanings revealed
I Respond to life’s bounty.
Assume responsibility
For one’s self
For each other.
Welcome the world
Understand–
With childlike wonder
Become one;
Become whole
Transform the self.
A colleague of mine, Laura Kinkead wrote this beautiful poem which is appropriate for this time of the year. As we await the New Year, there is a feeling of being at the threshold. It is a time to reflect on what and who is important in our lives as we enter the New Year.
The poem is a reminder that what brought me to this point serves to ground me. It is the people and things that have expressed their love in many ways that allow me to find moments of solace, abundance, and opportunities to linger as I cross each new threshold. I am gently reminded to listen to the soft voice from within that reminds me of the richness of life.
Summer’s abundance within me
and Winter’s rest ahead of me,
I linger
At the threshold,
What beckons me, pulls me forward,
calls deeply,
longingly,
What little voice reminds of what has come before
What do I gather up, too precious to part with,
And what do I leave behind
glad to rest beneath the soil
to become the rich humus of tomorrow
I stand with the the sun’s warmth upon my face
as the wind pulls another leaf slowly to the ground
These are beautiful pictures of a Love Panther with a beautiful message offered by Melanie.
Life is a spiritual event. Those people and things we love inspire us to keep our heads up and our souls unconquerable. William Ernest Henley provided us with wonderful words that echo this way of understanding life and its relationships.
Apparently, this was Nelson Mandela’s favourite poem. When I read it, I understand what made it important in his life and what it reveals about leadership.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
This poem and post are beautiful reminders to remember the roots of where we each came from. It is important to let the roots dangle and check the dirt on them to see where they come from.
“Knowledge is the Harvest of Attention.”–Charles Olson
During the 30s, 40s, 50s, there was a college set up in North Carolina called Black Mountain College, which truly stressed a liberal arts education with plenty of arts. “Black Mountain College was born out of a desire to create a new type of college based on John Dewey’s principles of progressive education.”-blackmountaincollege.org American poet, Charles Olson was born today in 1910 and taught at Black Mountain College in the 40s and 50s. “The founders of the College believed that the study and practice of art were indispensable aspects of a student’s general liberal arts education, and they hired Josef Albers to be the first art teacher. Speaking not a word of English, he and his wife Anni left the turmoil in Hitler’s Germany and crossed the Atlantic Ocean by boat to teach art…
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We had a quiet Christmas. Regardless, Christmas is about being with those who mean the most to you and we can do this physically and just by being, as well. Presence is about just being.
“Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused—in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened—by the recurrence of Christmas. There are people who will tell you that Christmas is not to them what it used to be; that each succeeding Christmas has found some cherished hope, or happy prospect, of the year before, dimmed or passed away; that the present only serves to remind them of reduced circumstances and straitened incomes—of the feasts they once bestowed on hollow friends, and of the cold looks that meet them now, in adversity and misfortune. Never heed such dismal reminiscences. There are few men who have lived long enough in the world who cannot call up such thoughts any day of the year. Then do not select the merriest of the three hundred and sixty-five for your doleful recollections, but…
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This haiku is a beautiful and simple expression of the time of the year. Take care. Have a safe and happy holidays with family and friends.
O’ Heavenly Star
Two millennia guiding
~ Path to Bethlehem ~
~
~~ Dominic R. DiFrancesco ~
The way the world and the universe are in order is something we take for granted in daily life. We overlook the ordinary, but there is importance layered in the ordinary. It is here we find the extraordinary. We come and go and, when we pay attention, so much is revealed about the world and the way we help create it.
Billy Collins shared a common, everyday way to examine the patterns of life, the Dharma of the world we live with all the time by examining a dog and the way she lives life without worrying about life.
The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her dog house
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.
Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Ghandi with his staff and his holy diapers?
Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.
If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 