Sunday, January 7, 2024
Monday, January 1, 2024
Saturday, December 30, 2023
𝗕𝗼𝗿𝗻 𝗔𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻
Let’s be clear about this:
It isn’t the same as being sick
and getting better. It isn’t
changing your mind at the last minute
or pushing away from the brink.
The only way to be born again
is to die. The Phoenix doesn’t just
go up in a blaze of glory. It
feels the fire lick up and sizzle
every feather, until each quill
becomes
a column of flame carried straight to
the core.
Whatever the legend of re-birth,
there is always
time in the fire, under the ground,
hanging on the cross or the tree.
Don’t skip over that part of the
story.
If you would be reborn, you have to
die.
But what then? After the dying
how are we to rise again into new
life?
The earth, the hero, the god, you and
I—
how does any of us find our way back
from the Valley of the Shadow?
The same way we die:
Walk into the light.
- Lynn Ungar -
Friday, December 29, 2023
Thursday, December 28, 2023
𝗙𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗹𝗼𝘄
Knowing her first, I felt her stream
run smooth,
skip playfully on rocks
and fall down liquid hills.
"Follow the flow," was her
advice.
I did not understand.
In later years I met her once again.
She was a river grown,
swollen with life,
pulled by strong currents down toward
unknown seas.
One felt the peaceful eddies, and the
deep longing for the ocean's bed,
and she ran blue as the later summer
years she bore.
"Follow the flow," she
said.
Then there was parting, and we did
not meet again
until one year when frost was chain
about us.
I wondered, then, if she had frozen,
too,
into the static waiting of old age,
reverting back to narrow winter
stream.
but when I saw her eyes, I knew
she was Pacific now, and stretched
horizons and beyond.
Ice could not crust on her
nor the frost chain
but rather wisdom pulled her tides.
Her deeps were heavy with the weight
of love.
I understood, then, what it is to
follow flow:
someday, one meets and mingles with
the sea.
- Carol Bialock RSCJ -