Weekly Reading

Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature nor do the children of man
as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

~Helen Keller

Weekly Reading

Every creature on the face of the earth
seems to know how to be quiet and still.

A butterfly on a leaf, a cat in front of a fireplace,
even a hummingbird comes to rest sometime.

But humans are constantly on the go. We seem to have lost the
ability just to be quiet, to simply be present in the stillness
that is the basis of our existence.

~John Daido Loori

Weekly Reading

How Everything Adores Being Alive

What
if you were
a beetle,
and a soft wind

and a certain allowance of time
had summoned you
out of your wrappings,
and there you were,

so many legs
hardening,
maybe even
more than one pair of eyes

and the whole world
in front of you?
And what if you had wings
and flew

into the garden,
then fell
into the up-tipped
face

of a white flower,
and what if you had
a sort of mouth,
a lip

to place close
to the skimof honey
that kept offering itself -

what would you think then
of the world
as, night and day,
you were kept there -

oh happy prisoner - sighing, humming,
roaming
that deep cup?

~ Mary Oliver

Weekly Reading

SOAR WITH THE EAGLES

There's an old fable that talks about a man who found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eagle hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life, the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet in the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth-- we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.

How sad when we who are children of God live as chickens when we could fly with the eagles.
~Anonymous

Weekly Reading

Summer Story

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels

of the blossoms,
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,

I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in this world

that aren’t
pieces of gold
or power —
that nobody owns

or could buy even
for a hillside of money—
that just
float about the world,

or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines,
and now here I am

spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling,
so that I feel I am myself

a small bird
with a terrible hunger,
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heartbeat ahead of breaking—
and I am the hunger and the assuagement,
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.

~Mary Oliver