“Don’t let your throat tighten with fear. Take sips of breath all day and night, before death closes your mouth.”–Rumi When I was 18 at Beloit College, I took a literature class with John which changed my life forever. John was a greying, bearded professor with a musical voice who had us meet at 6am […]
Kissing The Ground
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. –Rumi I recently had a birthday. I […]
Feed the Birds: Finding Balance Between Action and Acceptance
Song For Making the Birds Come by Stephen Dobyns For Shirley Stark All winter you felt nothing. As your body continued its necessary tasks, your brother, the snow, remained keeper of your heart. Now it’s the first warm day of spring. You walk out to the pasture. There’s much mud, and still snow on the […]
A Meditation on Fear
“I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”—Mark Twain “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.” –Leo Buscaglia Fear runs in my family. Though all of us have happy lives, on any given night, someone is probably awake in the middle […]
Resting in The Grace of the World During The Holidays
The Peace of Wild Things When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron […]
Gratitude in Difficult Times
“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” –Rumi They say that gratitude is the enemy of anxiety. There are countless studies that describe the clear link between gratitude and happiness and positive psychologists all around the world are encouraging clients to adopt gratitude practices to combat depression. Gratitude is important for mental […]
