Scintilla

09/23/2021

From James Clear - one of my faves. I love his book Atomic Habits

"The world rewards you for value provided, not time spent."

"The important thing is not to keep winning, but to keep reaching."

***
We live in such a linear world it's easy to forget that our true nature has a rhythm and loves cycles. Plant the seed, weather the storm, curse the horn worm, lament the failures, rejoice and harvest the fruit. The seeds may have been planted at the same time - but what happens next is a wild ride and dictates where focus is required.

Pay attention. The rhythm and not rules are your clock.

3 IDEAS FROM ME I. “The world rewards you for value provided, not time spent.” ​II. “The important thing is not to keep winning, but to keep reaching.” III. “Always leave room for the unexpected. A buffer of time, a little extra money, a reserve of goodwill. You won't be maximizing every...

09/23/2021

Love this...

soul nate


jury duty is a wild concept. whenever the government wants, they can just be like “call off work bestie, we need you to solve a murder 🥰 here’s fifteen dollars.”

10/05/2018

If you are a lover of words and ideas and haven't experienced Maria Popova's Brain Pickings - treat yourself and visit her site. Through her curation of the artistic expressions of others and via her own finely crafted words, she creates a place of respite and renewal for all. From her latest 'Midweek pick-me-up':

An exquisite letter of advice she (Anais Nin) sent to a seventeen-year-old aspiring author by the name of Leonard W., whom she had taken under her wing as creative mentor. Nin writes:

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

[…]

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4

08/28/2018

Thanks to the Payson family's bounteous gift, we had some amazing Butternut Squash Soup on Sunday!

Rubbed the squash with olive oil, sprinkled with smoked garlic salt/pepper and roasted in the oven at 450 for about 45 minutes. While the squash was roasting, I sauteed some shallots and leftover kielbasa. Scooped and blended the roasted Butternut with chicken stock and half and half. Threw everything together 'a la peanut butter sandwiches' and YUM YUM YUM YUM!!! Served with Ezekiel Bread Garlic Parmesan Toast and Cucumber/Tomato/Marinated Pearl Onion side salad.

(the Peaches were scrumtabulous too!!)

Love you guys!

08/28/2018

Oh I am love, loving this poem.

Beneath The Sweater And The Skin

How many years of beauty do I have left?
she asks me.
How many more do you want?
Here. Here is 34. Here is 50.

When you are 80 years old
and your beauty rises in ways
your cells cannot even imagine now
and your wild bones grow luminous and
ripe, having carried the weight
of a passionate life.

When your hair is aflame
with winter
and you have decades of
learning and leaving and loving
sewn into
the corners of your eyes
and your children come home
to find their own history
in your face.

When you know what it feels like to fail
ferociously
and have gained the
capacity
to rise and rise and rise again.

When you can make your tea
on a quiet and ridiculously lonely afternoon
and still have a song in your heart
Queen owl wings beating
beneath the cotton of your sweater.

Because your beauty began there
beneath the sweater and the skin,
remember?

This is when I will take you
into my arms and coo
YOU BRAVE AND GLORIOUS THING
you've come so far.

I see you.
Your beauty is breathtaking.

~ Jeannette Encinias

08/28/2018

Song for the day!

LYRICS
Complicated Creation

I called up the moon for a little consultation.
Yes, you know that I'm a happy man, but something in me is burning.
I gotta push it, push it out,
So much frustration.

The moon called me back
And said "I'll give you some advice: You gotta live a little lighter,
You gotta breathe a little deeper
You gotta suck it, suck it in.
There's your meditation."

If you pray to God for rain,
don't you complain about the lightning.
If your asking for directions,
don't you moan about the distance.
Must you lose it, lose it all?
To find your appreciation.

If you rid of all your baggage you will likely float away.
But you can't know beauty if you don't know pain
Gotta feel it, feel it all.
There's your medication

You know you are as small as the things you let annoy you.
And you know you are gigantic as the things that you adore.
Some days you give thanks.
Some days you give the finger.
It's a complicated creation.

From the album Love - 2013

08/28/2018

Poem - Tuesday Psychic Pick ; )

LEAD

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world. ~Mary Oliver

(art by Roslyn Ramsay)

08/24/2018

This feeling
~
This feeling makes me want to run.
Take a drink.
Sleep.
Anything but feel.
Not so different from other panics, but distinct in its flavor of pain.
I don’t want to trace it to its roots.
To last night’s dream of sending you to travel a long winding sidewalk on your own.
Realizing, with horror
that I’d let you go alone.
~
Tonight
You said that you want to sleep with us forever.
I know it’s wrong but, for tonight, come on.
Even though it means violent cover wars.
(how can you be my daughter, you who throws off the blankets with wild abandon?)
Even though it means this bed of marriage is literally divided.
(to be fair, I’m not ready to let go either)
Even though you slowly encroach upon my space and I slowly lose my mind.
(the panic faintly subsides when, skin to skin, I can feel you sleep and breathe)
~
Yesterday
I stared blankly at the other mothers who told me that they will cry when you (the archetype young you) goes to school.
‘We’re excited’, I said.
Until we dreamed in tandem, this night, each of leaving the other.
~
Before
We lost your brother.
I had a vision that the dock I was standing on collapsed.
I fell deep and yet not deep into translucent olive gold green water.
The hand of God reached in and pulled me out.
~
Right Now
I feel that lake inside of me.
God is reaching down in a loop.
I am simultaneously inside and outside of the water.
Falling and rescued.
Unaware of what is to come.
Convalescing in my grief after it has happened.
The golden light in the olive green water is you.
The archetypal and real hope of you.
God pulls me out of the water.
I pray, with all my might, that you will follow.

08/13/2018

Prayer for Today – Stillness – 8/13/2018

May I be still.
May I trust in stillness.
May I let things come to me.
***
Help me to understand the Law of Receptivity which states that the key to effective giving is staying open to receiving.

Help me to understand that by trying to control life, I am denying the essential dynamic of partnership.
***
Give me the courage to trust the divine order of unfoldment.
***
Thank you for the unexpected grace of friendship that I find when I stand still.

Thank you for your patience with me!
***
Help me to serve life by being aware of and active in the moment.
***
And so it is.

08/09/2018

Prayer for Today – WTF– 8/9/2018

To whatever it is that glues all of this s**t together: I tried to sing your praises today. To be schmancy and poetic, and it sucked. The truth is, today is a harder day for some reason. I understand that, on a physics level, for something to change form it has to break apart and then come together in a different configuration. Is this what you’re up to with me? (I ask like I don’t know that it’s what you’re up to, but it is what you’re up to, it’s what I’m up to – because, after all, I’m really just a mini universe that’s held to the laws of physics, whether I understand them or not).

To be honest, I’m having a hard time swallowing whatever it is that is trying to happen. I’m confused. I don’t know what I want. I feel like everyone else does. I feel like I’m going to run out of time. I feel like this is a first world problem. I feel embarrassed.

I’m sorry - I don’t mean to be ungrateful. After all, it’s a miracle to be alive and breathing. To be able to think and feel large large things. To then try to express said things using kooky arbitrary symbols that comprise ‘words’. That’s super cool. The fact that I will NEVER EVER understand what the f*** I’m doing here, what I’m supposed to do, what the rules are – also, paradoxically, super cool.

So, I guess, can you help me relax about it all? And, while you’re at it, I REALLLLY wouldn’t mind a prophetic dream or two. Angels that I can hear? How about a Secret Codex that spells out the Theory of Everything and transforms me into a cool, sexy nature goddess wizard healer.

Thank you. Amen.

08/08/2018

Prayer for Today – Acceptance – 8/8/2018

All-Encompassing Mother and Father – I Thank you for this day. I am blessed to wake up in a safe and comfortable home with a family that I treasure. (Even if the laundry piles on the floor are growing like a mutating alien abomination) So, then, I must thank you for the mess in my life, both internal and external. May I sit with the energy of unkempt chaos that lives inside of me and learn what it wants from me. May I love and accept the imperfect parts of myself, inviting them to teach me about surrender.

Thank you for loving me as your daughter – a love so large that when I let it in, resurrects me from the pain of my own exile. Forgive me for my stubborn self-pity and pain. Help me to understand that it is safe to open my heart, to see the truth, to be the unique flawed gem of consciousness that I am.

Divine All, help me lean into the chasm of my fear and to find my strength and freedom in free fall. Help me to hear you. Help me to respond.

Amen.

(photo by Michael Divine)

01/09/2018

Ok, sure. So it takes Wine to get me back into the Swing of things. More to follow, but wanted to share this fun opportunity for all my Artist friends out there. Happy New Year!

Submit your design by March 2 for a chance at a cash prize and much more.