“Some photographers take reality…and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.”
Oh yes please! On this vernal equinox (the earliest since 1896!), the earth’s readiness to awaken from a rich quiet into a bursting celebration of life is apparent. Today, the night and day have equal measure. But from here, each day is expanded in the light to allow growth deep down into the roots, and upward into new heights.
May it be so with you too, as the sun crosses into our northern hemisphere, may your growth deepen and your expansion blossom into new heights!
Allow yourself to be wildly feverish with Spring!
“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
-Mark Twain
Never yet was a springtime, when the buds forgot to bloom.
From the website, shinrin-yoku.org, these words about the benefits of “forest bathing,” show the sweetness awaiting an immersion in the woods… how to be alive in all your senses.
“In an unhurried way, allow your feet to wander.
Shinrin-yoku is not about exercise.
It is not about hurry. It is about being alive in all your senses
and trusting that the forest
and other landscapes upon which you wander hold something
good for you.”
Something hidden…
go and find it!
Go and look behind the ranges.
Something lost behind the ranges.
Lost, and waiting for you.
Go!”
-Kipling
also from the shinrin-yoku website:
What if the land actually loves humans?
What if it needs us?
As our species evolved with all other species
in an interdependent dance,
a long ceremony of mutuality,
each of us bound by invisible threads
within a vast web of interdependence?
If this is the way of things,
then does it not make sense that the land needs us?
Come to it ready to invite its gifts.
Speak to it; let it know what you need.
Brene Brown has a depth of vision for creating more loving kindness in herself, and in the world. She has a lot to teach, and this short video on the importance of boundaries, to sustainable compassion, love, and empathy is profound.
Boundaries are not walls, not separation, but simply and powerfully, they create respect.
Expect the best from everyone, and assume they are absolutely doing the best they can with the tools that they have in this moment.
Let’s bring more love and compassion into the world!!
I hope you can take time to savor these sumptuous words from Matt Licata, and absorb with wonder this new winter day…
“On this new winter day, it is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come – that another opportunity will be given to witness a sunrise, to breathe into the heart, to be astonished at the crystals in the newly fallen snow, to share a moment of attuned connection with the bunnies on our morning walk.
But another part of us knows it is so fragile here, so tenuous, and that this opening into life will not be here for much longer. Recognizing this, let us surrender the dream of postponement by doing whatever we can to help others, by being fully here and entering into the dark and into the light with them, no longer apologizing for our uniqueness, our sensitivity, and the gifts of our embodied vulnerability.
At the end of this life – which is sure to come much sooner than we’d like – it is unlikely we’ll ask if we accomplished the tasks on our to-do lists, completed some mythical journey of ‘awakening,’ perfected ourselves, ‘healed’ our past, played it safe, got all of our ‘needs’ met, made it big, ‘manifested’ everything we wanted, or achieved all of our goals.
Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?
Did I pause each day to behold the wonder of just one unfolding here and now moment? Was I willing to take a risk, to feel more, to care so deeply about this life, to let another matter, and to honor *this* very experience, exactly as it has been given?
Did I stay close with the mysterious movement of both sweet and fierce grace as it took form as the others in my life, and as the wisdom flow of feeling, of emotion, and of sensation in this body? Was I willing to fall in love, to truly fall in love with this life, exactly as it is? Was I willing to provide a home, a sanctuary, and safe passage for all of me, an environment of wholeness and integration to dance, rest, and play in?
Was I willing to set aside the unending need to make this moment different?
What is it that remains unlived… for you? How have you been holding back? What are you waiting for? What are the feelings you must re-embody to in order to fully come alive here?
The bounty and the harvest of this world is upon you. It is always already here, erupting in the here and now, and is not waiting. The spell of the ‘next moment’ has been broken.
I hope I make it all the way through this sweetest of ever winter days, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.”
“As you move through these changing times… be easy on yourself and be easy on one another. You are at the beginning of something new. You are learning a new way of being. You will find that you are working less in the yang modes that you are used to.
You will stop working so hard at getting from point A to point B the way you have in the past, but instead, will spend more time experiencing yourself in the whole, and your place in it.
Instead of traveling to a goal out there, you will voyage deeper into yourself. Your mother’s grandmother knew how to do this. Your ancestors from long ago knew how to do this. They knew the power of the feminine principle… and because you carry their DNA in your body, this wisdom and this way of being is within you.
Call on it. Call it up. Invite your ancestors in. As the yang based habits and the decaying institutions on our planet begin to crumble, look up. A breeze is stirring. Feel the sun on your wings.”
