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 […]
Core of Cores
I grew up loving stories. Before bed, I would always be cuddled up with a book that transported me to a different world. Tales of phoenixes, time travel, magic, and kids who survived and learned to love with the help of animals gave me hope and comfort. Stories gave me a framework to view the […]
The Sweet Passion of Oneness
Reckless Poem Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over. It is heaven-sent. It flows through me like the blue wave. Green leaves – you may believe this or not – have once or twice emerged from the tips of my fingers somewhere deep in the woods, in the reckless seizure of […]
