Awe-Gratitude-Joy
9,000 Ways to Be a Plant
I went to college near Chicago – long, cold, snowy-icy winters. On campus, crocuses would start to push their blossoms through the snow in late April-early May. Hope! Spring! Warmer weather. Like hope pushing through the murk now as people get vaccinated and the number of new coronavirus cases slowly comes down. Last week, when […]
Joyful Movement as Shoulder Heals
This joyful, playful, energizing (4 minute) video was sent to me by friends when they learned my shoulder is healing well and was released from its sling three days ago after being immobilized 24/7 for 6 weeks. While I may not dance as exuberantly as the folks of all ages and races in this video, and […]
Gratitude – In Joy and In Pain
A friend sent me this link on Thanksgiving Day to a joyful, uplifting invocation to gratitude from people from all over the world. I knew I would have to post it as a belated Thanksgiving greeting to readers of this newsletter. Try it! It’s brief in time but so deep in heartfulness and joy. Then, the morning I was […]
More uplift
Every morning an image of a cloud such as the image above arrives in my inbox from the Cloud Appreciation Society. And two weeks ago accompanied by this quote: It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more […]
Grateful to be Keepin’ On Keepin’ On
It’s the turning toward “yes” that keeps the heart open to the miracles of daily living, keeps awareness opening to the bigger picture, keeps us keepin’ on. I closed my May 6, 2020 post Plowing through the Day with Gratitude with those words. We were all just learning then how to cope with the disruptions […]
Caring Connections Where You’d Least Expect to Find Them – Wild Animal Friendships
Wildlife biologist Liz Bonnin spent a year traveling all over the world, researching and reporting on the most unusual pairings of friendships across species in the wild: a goat and a hippopotamus, a dog and a tiger, an ocelot and a chimpanzee, a cat and a duck. The hour-long film, The Oddest Animal Friendships, has […]
Joy as an Agent of Social Change – Really?
My mentor James Baraz reminded me the other day of the wisdom of: Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. – Dr. Howard Thurman Dr. Thurman was as African-American minister, theologian, author, the co-founder of […]
Paradox of Pandemic – Weariness and Wonder
“We Are Not Stuck at Home. We Are Blessed to Have a Home” comes from a sign sent to me by my friend Lynn. There are so many paradoxes these days of coping with sheltering-in-place. A neighbor walking her dog stopped to take a photo on her cell phone of the bougainvillea blooming to bursting […]
Plowing through the Day with Gratitude
There’s much deep wisdom in “being grateful for everything that is going more than all right,” as my teacher James Baraz would say, to plow through despair when things are going terribly wrong. Or even mildly wrong. Or are just wearying. Coping with the losses and changes from this current pandemic can be hard. […]
Delight is Essential to Resilience, Too – A Rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony Like You’ve Never Seen or Heard Before.
The CD of the San Francisco Symphony playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony lives in the CD player of my car. In the “old days” of long, traffic-snarled commutes, that was my go-to for shifting my mood while inching through traffic. Now a friend sent me the link to the most delightful presentation of the opening movement […]