Posts tagged ‘yosemite national park’
Secrets at Dawn
The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.
– Jalaluddin Rumi
Wednesday of Hope – Inevitability of Dreams
At first dreams seem impossible, then improbable, then inevitable.
– Christopher Reeve
Wednesday of Hope – Tipping the Scales
In a world of injustice, God once and for all tips the scales in the favor of hope.
– Max Lucado
We in the Mountains/The Mountains in Us
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.
– John Muir
Presence
Presenceby Stephen LeakeAcross the dark, a robin learns the Winter.A candle dissolves; frank and sensuousAgainst the extending light.The streets remain illegible with snow.I travel through you; uncurlingWhere weather decorates the nightAnd naves of Christmas pinesGrasp human shadows.Alone I go, echoing carolsIn powdered places. Echoes that are glorified.Prolonged.Until I find you on the benchPressed with our pasts.A child again. Tricked and traced byMemory’s gift. Lasting. Imprinted.A proof of the year’s new world.Source: http://www.christmas-time.com/presence.htm – found on the Education for Justice website.
I think I’ll have to wait a while for the snow to clear from this bench.
The Observer
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Rainier Maria Rilke.
The Observer
I can tell a storm by the way the trees
are whipping, compared to when quiet,
against my trembling windows, and
I hear from afar things whispering
I couldn’t bear hearing without a friend
or love without a sister close by.There moves the storm, the transforming one,
and runs through the woods and through the age,
changing it all to look ageless and young:
the landscape appears like the verse of a psalm,
so earnest, eternal, and strong.How small is what we contend with and fight;
how great what contends with us;
if only we mirrored the moves of the things
and acquiesced to the force of the storm,
we, too, could be ageless and strong.
For what we can conquer is only the small,
and winning itself turns us into dwarfs;
but the everlasting and truly important
will never be conquered by us.
It is the angel who made himself known
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
for whenever he saw his opponents propose
to test their iron-clad muscle strength,
he touched them like strings of an instrument
and played their low-sounding chords.Whoever submits to this angel,
whoever refuses to fight the fight,
comes out walking straight and great and upright,
and the hand once rigid and hard
shapes around as a gently curved guard.
No longer is winning a tempting bait.
One’s progress is to be conquered, instead,
by the ever mightier one.Source: “The Observer” from Pictures of God; Rilke’s Religious Poetry,
translated by Annemarie Kidder. Livonia, MI: First Page Publications, 2005.
On the Sixth Day of Christmas
How shall we walk into the new year?
The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.
– Frederick Buechner
