Reading Saturday AM

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter, floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it. People would walk around it, marvelling at its big pools of water, its little pools, and the water flowing between the pools. People would marvel at the bumps on it, and the holes in it, and they would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it, and the water suspended in the gas. The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface of the ball, and the creatures in the water. The people would declare it precious because it was the only one, and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt. The ball would be the greatest wonder ever known, and people would come to behold it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty, and to wonder how it could be. People would love it, and defend it with their lives, because they would somehow know their lives, their own "roundness", could be nothing without it.

Reading Saturday AM

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.Hello, you who made the morningand spread it over the fieldsand into the faces of the tulipsand the nodding morning glories,and into the windows of, even, themiserable and the crotchety best preacher that ever was,dear star, that just happensto be where you are in the universeto keep us from ever-darkness,to ease us with warm touching,to hold us in the great hands of light –good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
~ Mary Oliver ~

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

Weekly Reading

The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever, which has nevertheless always been, like a sharp iron hoof, at the center of my mind. One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning — some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain. But to lift the hoof! For that you need an idea. For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And thenthe butterflyrose, weightless, in the wind.“Don’t love your life too much,” it said,and vanished into the world.
~Mary Oliver