Friday, December 31, 2010

Christmas Eve Yoga

raised $647 for People Gotta Eat!!!

Thanks to the generous nature of participating yogis!
This amount will be matched- totaling $1294 for local food pantries.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Weekly Reading

We, Angels and Mortal's, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves.
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.
Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Weekly Reading

“Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise,
trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things
and still be calm in your heart.”

Monday, November 22, 2010

Weekly Reading

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.
~ Mary Oliver

Monday, November 15, 2010

Weekly Reading

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~Mary Oliver

Friday, November 12, 2010

Weekly Reading

I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I will choose to inhabit my days. To allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live as that which came to me as a seed goes to the next as blossom and that which came to me as blossom goes on as fruit.
~Dawna Markova

Weekly Reading

Song For the Salmon
For too many days now I have not written of the sea,
nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
we find between the islands
For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn
I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.
I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
opening its white hands on the seashore,
nor the salted wind, whole and healthy
filling the chest with living air.
I have not heard those waves
fallen out of heaven onto earth,
nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
of a thousand miles of ocean
giving up its strength on the sand.
But now I have spoken of that great sea,
the ocean of longing shifts through me,
the blessed inner star of navigation
moves in the dark sky above
and I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide.
-David Whyte

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Weekly Reading

The Ocean Moving All Night

Stay with us. Don't sink to the bottom like a fish going to sleep.
Be with the ocean moving steadily all night,
not scattered like a rainstorm.
The spring we're looking for is somewhere in this murkiness
See the night-lights up there traveling together,
the candle awake in its gold dish.
Don't slide into the cracks of the ground like spilled mercury.
When the full moon comes out, look around.
~Rumi

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Weekly Reading

Our Greatest Fear

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to manifest the glory of
God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.
—Marianne Williamson

Monday, October 4, 2010

Weekly Reading

“Darkness”
- The Necessity of Darkness
The next time you are feeling spiritually dark, remember that our hearts started beating in the darkness of the womb, seeds germinate in the darkness of the earth, and the earth rests in the darkness of winter so that spring can return. We all need fallow time. Darkness is a gift – it’s a great open space in which anything can happen. Surrender to it and the light will return.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Weekly Reading

Choice II

I do not respond
in predictable ways,
like a rat in a maze.
I am not controlled
by people or events.
I make conscious choices
that put me
in control of my life.
I think, then act,
and watch my life transform.
Spirit turns
the darkness before me
into light.
When blind to solutions at hand,
when the way seems blocked,
I trust divine intelligence
to reveal answers
and show the way
to paths I have not known.
~Gabriel Halpern

Weekly Reading

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence –
which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so.
The cat, sleeping on the fence, is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse. The tear is famous – briefly – to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom – is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth – more famous than the dress shoe
–which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it,
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets.
To sticky children in grocery lines, famous is the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous or a buttonhole.
Not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Monday, August 30, 2010

Weekly Reading

“Happiness is not an individual matter. When you are able to bring relief, or bring back the smile to one person, not only that person profits, but you also profit. The deepest happiness you can have comes from that capacity to help relieve the suffering of others. So if we have the habit of being peace, then there is a natural tendency for us to go in the direction of service. Nothing compels us, except the joy of sharing peace, the joy of sharing freedom from afflictions, freedom from worries, freedom from craving, which are the true foundations for happiness."
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Weekly Reading

It is I who must love myself. No one else can make me feel
whole. Only I can provide that love.Now I know that whole-
ness is always accessible to me and all beings everywhere.
This knowingallows me to live with a new peacefulness and
kindness to myself and others. In the simplest way, it has
changed my whole life.
-- After the Ecstacy, The Laundry

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Weekly Reading

“I have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing. And nothing happens! Nothing ... Silence ... Waves. Nothing happens? Or Has everything Happened and we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?”
~Juan Ramon Jimenez

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Weekly Reading

The Poet Goes to Indiana

I'll tell you a half-dozen things
that happened to me
in Indiana
when I went that far west to teach.
You tell me if it was worth it.

I lived in the country
with my dog—
part of the bargain of coming.
And there was a pondwith fish from, I think, China.
I felt them sometimes against my feet.
Also, they crept out of the pond, along its edges,
to eat the grass.
I'm not lying.
And I saw coyotes,
two of them, at dawn, running over the seemingly
unenclosed fields.
And once a deer, but a buck, thick-necked, leaped
into the road just-oh, I mean just, in front of my car—
and we both made it home safe.
And once the blacksmith came to care for the four horses,
or the three horses that belonged to the owner of the house,
and I bargained with him, if I could catch the fourth,
he, too, would have hooves trimmed
for the Indiana winter,
and apples did it,
and a rope over the neck did it,
so I won something wonderful;
and there was, one morning,
an owl
flying, oh pale angel, into
the hay loft of a barn,
I see it still;and there was once, oh wonderful, a new horse in the pasture,
a tall, slim being-a neighbor was keeping her there—
and she put her face against my face,
put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets,
against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me,
to see who I was,
a long quiet minute-minutes—
then she stamped feet and whisked tail
and danced deliciously into the grass away, and came back.
She was saying, so plainly, that I was good, or good enough.
Such a fine time I had teaching in Indiana.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Weekly Reading

Toad
I was walking by. He was sitting there.
It was full morning, so the heat was heavy on his sand-colored
head and his webbed feet.
I squatted beside him, at the edge
of the path. He didn't move.
I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time.
The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night.
About this cup we call a life. About happiness.
And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.
He looked neither up nor down, which didn't necessarily
mean he was either afraid or asleep.
I felt his energy, stored under his tongue perhaps,
and behind his bulging eyes.
I talked about how the world seems to me,
five feet tall, the blue sky all around my head.
I said, I wondered how it seemed
to him, down there, intimate with the dust.
He might have been Buddha— did not move, blink, or frown,
not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as the refined
anguish of language passed over him.
~Mary Oliver

Weekly Reading

Song of the Builder
On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God -
a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside
this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.
~Mary Oliver

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Weekly Reading

“Just a minute,” said a voice in the weeds.
So I stood still
in the day’s exquisite early morning light
and so I didn’t crush with my great feet
any small or unusual thing just happening to pass by
where I was passing by
on my way to the blueberry fields,
and maybe it was the toad
and maybe it was the June beetle
and maybe it was the pink and tender worm
who does his work without limbs or eyes
and does it well
or maybe it was the walking stick, still frail
and walking humbly by, looking for a tree,
or maybe, like Blake’s wondrous meeting, it was
the elves, carrying one of their own
on a rose-petal coffin away, away
into the deep grasses. After awhile
the quaintest voice said, “Thank you.” And then there was silence.
For the rest, I would keep you wondering.
~Mary Oliver

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Weekly Reading

"I should be content to look at a mountain for what it is
and not as a comment on my life."
~David Ignatow

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Weekly Reading

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver

Friday, June 4, 2010

Weekly Reading

The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love Born out of concern for all beings...
As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.

The Dhammapada

Monday, May 31, 2010

Weekly Reading

Eating Poetry

My poems resemble the bread of Egypt—one night
Passes over it, and you can't eat it any more.

So gobble them down now, while they're still fresh,
Before the dust of the world settles on them.

Where a poem belongs is here, in the warmth of the chest;
Out in the world it dies of cold.

You've seen a fish—put him on dry land,
He quivers for a few minutes, and then is still.

And even if you eat my poems while they're still fresh,
You still have to bring forward many images yourself.

Actually, friend, what you're eating is your own imagination.
These poems are not just some old proverbs.
~Rumi

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Weekly Reading

The Student
My poetry instruction book,
which I bought at an outdoor stall along the river,

contains many rules
about what to avoid and what to follow.
More than two people in a poem
is a crowd, is one.

Mention what clothes you are wearing
as you compose, is another.
Avoid the word vortex,
the word velvety, and the word cicada.

When at a loss for an ending,
have some brown hens standing in the rain.

Never admit that you revise.
And--always keep your poem in one season.

I try to be mindful,
but in these last days of summer
whenever I look up from my page
and see a burn-mark of yellow leaves,

I think of the icy winds
that will soon be knifing through my jacket.
---Billy Collins

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Weekly Reading

You, Reader
I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you.

that it was I who got up early
to sit in the kitchen
and mention with a pen

the rain-soaked windows,
the ivy wallpaper,
and the goldfish circling in its bowl

Go ahead and turn aside,
bite your lip and tear out the page,
but, listen -- it was just a matter of time

before one of us happened
to notice the unlit candles
and the clock humming on the wall.

Plus, nothing happened that morning--
a song on the radio,
a car whistling along the road outside--

and I was only thinking
about the shakers of salt and pepper
that were standing side by side on a place mat.

I wondered if they had become friends
after all these years
or if they were still strangers to one another

like you and I
who manage to be known and unknown
to each other at the same time --

me at this table with a bowl of pears,
you leaning in a doorway somewhere
near some blue hydrangeas, reading this.
~Billy Collins

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Weekly Reading

Genius
was what they called you in high school
if you tripped on a shoelace in the hall
and all your books went flying.

Or if you walked into an open locker door
you would be known as Einstein,
who imagined riding a streetcar into infinity.

Later, genius became someone
who could take a sliver of chalk and squire pi
a hundred places out beyond the decimal point,

or someone painting on his back on a scaffold,
or a man drawing a waterwheel in a margin,
or spinning out a little night music.

But earlier this week on a wooded path,
I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
were the true geniuses,

the ones who had figured out how to fly,
how to be both beautiful and brutal,
and how to mate for life.

Twenty-four geniuses in all,
for I numbered them as Yeats had done,
deployed upon the calm, crystalline surface--

forty-eight if we count their reflections,
or an even fifty if you want to toss in me
and the dog running up ahead,

who were smart enough to be out
that morning--she sniffing the ground,
me with my head up in the bight morning air.

~Billy Collins

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Weekly Reading

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~Mary Oliver

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Weekly Reading

I Pray to the Birds
I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry
the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because
I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin
and end each day -- the invocations and benedictions of Earth.
I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love
rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers,
they teach me how to listen.
~Terry Tempest Williams

Monday, April 12, 2010

Weekly Reading

Famous
The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
~Naomi Shihab Nye

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Weekly Reading

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable,
like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think about it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?
~ Mary Oliver

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Weekly Reading

This World

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Monday, March 22, 2010

Weekly Reading

What Was Once the Largest Shopping Center in Northern Ohio Was Built Where There Had Been a Pond I Used to Visit Every Summer Afternoon

Loving the earth, seeing what has been done to it,
I grow sharp, I grow cold.

Where will the trilliums go, and the coltsfoot?
Where will the pond lilies go to continue living
their simple, penniless lives, lifting
their faces of gold?

Impossible to believe we need so much
as the world wants us to buy.
I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips
than I could possibly use before I die.

Oh, I would like to live in an empty house,
with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass.
No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass.

And I suppose sometime I will.
Old and cold I will lie apart
from all this buying and selling, with only
the beautiful earth in my heart.
~Mary Oliver

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Weekly Reading

The Ocean Moving Steadily All Night
Stay with us.
Don’t sink to the bottom
like a fish going to sleep.
Be with the ocean moving
steadily all night,
not scattered like a rainstorm.
The spring we’re looking for is somewhere in this murkiness.
See the night-lights up there
traveling together, the candle awake in its gold dish.
Don’t slide into the cracks of the ground like spilled mercury.
When the full moon comes out,
look around.
~Rumi

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Weekly Reading

Choice II
I do not respond
in predictable ways,
like a rat in a maze.

I am not controlled
by people or events.

I make conscious choices
that put me
in control of my life.

I think, then act,
and watch my life transform.

Spirit turns
the darkness before me
into light.

When blind to solutions at hand,
when the way seems blocked,
I trust divine intelligence
to reveal answers
and show the way
to paths I have not known.
~Gabriel Halpern

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Weekly Reading

The Uses of Sorrow
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
~Mary Oliver

Friday, February 19, 2010

Weekly Reading

Ease
I am unhurried and relaxed.
I exude an aura
of peace and goodwill.

I know in spirit,there is only
the eternal now.

I do not force issues.
I let my goals and aspirations
unfold one at a time.

I accomplish all
that needs to be done
easily and efficiently.

I am in the right place
at the right time.

My body responds
to my sense of order
and perfect timing.

I enjoy each moment of ease,
this day.

~Gabriel Halpern

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Weekly Reading

Love Poem With Toast
Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.
~Miller Williams

Friday, February 5, 2010

Weekly Reading

Mornings at Blackwater
For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.
~Mary Oliver

Monday, February 1, 2010

Weekly Reading

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
~Stephen Mitchell's translation of Lao Tzu's Tao te Ching

Monday, January 18, 2010

Weekly Reading

Hatred paralyses life; love releases it.
Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.
Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

"I have decided to stick with love.
Hate is too great a burden to bear."

~Martin Luther King

Weekly Reading

The Opening of Eyes

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.
It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the visioin of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.
It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished, opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.
~David Whyte

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Weekly Reading

Head of the Year
The moon is dark tonight, a new
moon for a new year. It is
hollow and hungers to be full.
It is the black zero of beginning.

Now you must void yourself
of injuries, insults, incursions.
Go with empty hands to those
you have hurt and make amends.

It is not too late. It is early
and about to grow. Now
is the time to do what you
know you must and have feared
to begin. Your face is dark
too as you turn inward to face
yourself, the hidden twin of
all you must grow to be.

Forgive the dead year. Forgive
yourself. What will be wants
to push through your fingers.
The light you seek hides
in your belly. The light you
crave longs to stream from
your eyes. You are the moon
that will wax in new goodness.
~Marge Piercy

Friday, January 1, 2010

Weekly Reading

I said to the man who
stood at the gate of the year,

"Give me a light
that I may tread safely
into the unknown."

And he replied,
"Go out into the darkness and
put your hand into the hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light
and safer than a known way."
~Minnie Louise Harkins