A Blessing for the New Year

From To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessing by John O'Donohue

A Blessing for the New Year

Bennacht
For Josie.

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes
 Freeze behind
The gray window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colors,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
In the curragh of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To being you safely home.

My the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

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Happiness

"Happiness that the world can not take away only flourishes in the secret garden of our souls. By tending to our inner garden and uprooting the weeds of external expectations, can we nurture our authentic happiness the way we would nurture something that's beautiful and alive. Happiness is a living emotion."

~Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy by Sarah Ban Breathnach

 I love the visual, visceral (earthy instinct) of "uprooting the weeds of external expectations". Not just pulling the weeds; by doing such will allow them to return; but uprooting - firmly grasping the external expectation and removing every flower (even weeds have flowers all the more easily to be disguised), seed, stamen, and taproot of it! How liberating! Once the weeds are gone, with careful diligence, new shoots of growth - peace, gratitude, and happiness can be planted and tended.

Sometimes those "external expectations" become part of the my landscape without even a glance let alone a thoughtful, conscious, perusal. They feel like they are mine - the shoulds, woulds, cant's, all feeding on fear perpetuated by the "external expectations" of others that I have allowed to become mine.

It is time to work in my secret garden!

Seals and Croft....

"I may never pass this way again,
I want to laugh while ghe laughing is easy,
I want to cry if it makes it worthwhile,
We may never pass this way again..."

KEY TOLOVE AND FEAR

"You hold the key to love and fear,
All in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both,
It's there at your command."

Get Together
Th Youngbloods

Shame

"For a time I'd thought of that part of my life as wrong. But our earlier lives aren't wrong, they are just preconstruction, that's all. Our lives are meant to unfold, to evolve, and that's good. The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage, which would prevent this process from taking place."

~ Sue Monk Kidd

"We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."

~ George Bernard Shaw



"What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid."

~ Robin G. Collingwood

"I
woman give birth:
and this time to
myself."

 -- Alma Villanueva