Eventually, all things merge into one and a river runs through it.
-Norman Maclean
Category Archives: Sweet Breathing
Seven Sacred Principles
In a class I’m taking on line, a video featuring Doniga Markegard of Markegard Family Grass-Fed, explains how the seven sacred principles of the Lakota nation were taught to her as a child by her mentor Gilbert Walking Bull, and how these principles continue to inform her life and her approach to business. Her family farm in California, her commitment to these principles, to teaching, to connections, and to community are an inspiration.
The Seven Sacred Principles:
Sacred Silence
Compassion
Deep Caring for All Creation
Taking Action
Being Fully Alive
Joy Of a Child
Connection of Mind, Body & Spirit
To Greet the Morning
These winter mornings are filled with grace and gratitude.
Thank you is the sentiment of the heart.
Once You Are Real
“He said, ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.'”
-Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
Simplicity
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
– Hans Hofmann
The necessary?
Food, shelter, safety, beauty, Love.
What else do we truly need? If we are quiet enough, we can hear the real, the raw and the necessary.
The Time of Inner Workings
As The Day Moves Into Night
As this serene and majestic winter day winds into the night, I am absorbed with the simple luxury of watching the sun’s colors paint the evening sky. What better to be doing than this?
Still I will have time for more books, snow walks in the twilight, contemplation, before rest. I will wish for more before sleep…
The world is so grand in its offerings!
“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.”
~John Burroughs
We Always Begin Anew
2015 has dawned!
With it, a renewed realization that in every day, every hour and every new year, we are empowered to begin anew. We can create the miraculous. Revolutionary changes in our very being are available in each new moment.
The new year inspires. Breathing together and in solitary communion, we know we have the power to change. And to be. There is hope. A quickening. A deepening.
May 2015 allow deep breathing into the wonder…
and a realization of the gifts of the present.
Peace, prosperity, laughter, great love, simple deeds, adventures, inner growth, understanding, quiet, time to reflect in gratitude are wished for people everywhere. And to the planet and the animals may there be reverence, respect and radiance.
May our awareness allow the absorption into the new hours and moments of this new year.
The World in White
These snow days are sweet with wonder. The white carpet ensconces us warmly, allowing a deep simmering. The simmering distills to peace.
A soul distilled from simmering shimmers with radiance reflecting the peace within.
Sweet, soft glow across the snow. Oneness of white.
Time stills.
“There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.” – Joseph Wood Krutch
“Lo. sifted through the winds that blow, Down comes the soft and silent snow, White petals from the flowers that grow In the cold atmosphere.” -George W. Bungay
A New and Different Sun
“The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
~Christopher McCandless
Oh yes each day, every last one of them, whether spent at home in the familiar, or on a new exotic adventure, holds the promise of a different sun, and an endlessly changing horizon. Taking the time to absorb these wonders, in the new encounter with the often explored, or with the totally new experience, brings wonder into the moment, into our days, into our lives.
The picture above is from home, the one below from Bryce Canyon National Park, and the one below that from Amelia Island, Florida, and the final one from this year’s Christmas Day at home – a new and different sun as the sun rises to begin a new day each and every one…
