"Bright is the Day" Steven Charleston

“Bright is the day that dawns with new life, casting death’s grim shadow from the garden. Bright is the future for even the most humble soul, rising up in the arms of angels. Bright is the promise to all the Earth, sharing peace among the children of light. Let every voice sing this shining song, for we have been set free, we have been ransomed from our own history, given a chance to live again, to hope again, and to see the healing of God spread like sunlight into the rooms of time. It does not matter how you pray, this day is for you, it is the bright day, the birth day, the day when nothing will ever be the same, save the love that rolls back the stone.”

~ Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston, Choctaw, written for Easter 2015

"How To Be A Poet" by Wendell Berry

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

~ Wendell Berry ,"How to be a Poet" from Given.

"Let Mystery Have It's Place In You" Henri Frederic Amiel

"Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring."

~ Henri Frederic Amiel

"The Mother of All Arts" Gene Logsdon

“As a working definition of art, I lean toward Tolstoy's: "Art is a human activity having for it's purpose the transmission to other of the highest and best feelings to which mankind has risen." It seems to me that, regarding agrarian art, the farther it moves away from the natural world, especially when the main goal is money profits, the more difficult it becomes for it to reflect "the highest and best feelings" of humanity. The same is true of, of course, of agriculture itself. The farther it tries to remove itself from nature in search of money, the more it moves away from the highest and healthiest kinds of food.”

~ Gene Logsdon, The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse

"You Are The Only Faithful Student You Have" Rumi

You are the only faithful student you have.
All the others leave eventually.
Have you been making yourself shallow
with making others eminent?
Just remember, when you're in union,
you don't have to fear
that you'll be drained.
The command comes to speak,
and you feel the ocean
moving through you.
Then comes, Be silent,
as when the rain stops,
and the trees in the orchard
begin to draw moisture
up into themselves.

~ Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, "You Are the Only Student You Have"

"Birth, Breath and Death" Amy Wright Glenn

"Wisdom and insight are born when we stay close to the birthing and dying. Wounds from the past can be healed. Forgiveness and perspective dawn. Our culture is currently fragmented from much of this wisdom. The training of doulas represents a healing shift. By holding compassionate and nonjudgmental space, doulas support families as they make room for the generations to enter and exit this world. As we attend to birth and death, we touch upon a great mystery and deeply benefit from being starkly reminded of our own mortality...While the birth/postpartum doula movement makes important inroads in our maternity care system, great commitment and insight are needed to bring doula care to the dying. The elderly are easily disregarded in a culture that worships youthfulness, independence and productivity. Like infants, the dying remind us of our fragility, our dependency and our need for each other. When we sequester either birth or death, we lose touch with the truth of our interdependence, the nesting of generations, and what Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls our “interbeing.”

~ Amy Wright Glenn

"You are capable of love, and so need not despair of insignificance." Yorke Brown

"...you are most certainly an infinitesimal in the cold vastness of the cosmos, and yes, you are only one of billions of humans and other creatures who have come before and will come after, and your life is barely a mathematical instant in the span of time. But you are also--just as certainly--a miracle: you are a creature capable of thought, of wonder, of awe. You are a creature capable of recognizing that you are not the center of the Universe. And it is because of that very capacity that you can see in other people the same intrinsic value that you see in yourself. You are a miracle. You are capable of love, and so need not despair of insignificance."

~ Yorke Brown, Dartmouth Professor of Physics and Astronomy