Practical Wisdom for Extraordinary Living
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Another encore post, this time, from one I wrote back in 2005.
Court the Wild: Find Your Secret Spot in Nature
Courting the wild–spending one to two hours each day in nature–is a suggestion from author Jim Merkel. In his book, Radical Simplicity (New Society Publishers ©2003) he offers this important recommendation for how to remain sane [...]
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Oh Sweet Irrational Worship
by Thomas Merton
Wind and a bobwhite
And the afternoon sun.
By ceasing to question the sun
I have become light,
Bird and wind.
My leaves sing.
I am earth, earth
All these lighted things
Grow from my heart.
A tall, spare pine
Stands like the initial of my first
Name when I had one.
When I had a spirit,
When I was on fire
When this [...]
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Excerpted from an article by Skye Thomas, based on Butterfly, by Norie Huddle
After a caterpillar buries itself inside its cocoon, it waits to morph into a butterfly. The caterpillar does not simply shrink a bit and sprout wings. Instead, it sort of disintegrates into a puddle of ooze within the cocoon. If [...]
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PRAISE SONG
by Barbara Crooker
from Radiance
Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, [...]
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Leonids Over Us
by Marge Piercy
The sky is streaked with them
burning hole in black space –
like fireworks, someone says
all friendly in the dark chill
of Newcomb Hollow in November,
friends known only by voices.
We lie on the cold sand and it
embraces us, this beach
where locals never go in summer
and boast of their absence. Now
we lie eyes open to [...]
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Who is this flower above me?What is the work of this God?I would know myself in all of my parts. — the Flower Prayer, used in the Feri and Reclaiming traditions
What is the source of our truest heart’s desires? Where do these hopes and longings within us come from? Why are we sometimes given inspirations [...]
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Throughout my whole life, during every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within… The purple flush of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, to be lost finally in the [...]
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Nine of Pentacles
We are stardust,We are golden,And we’ve got to get ourselvesBack to the garden. — Joni Mitchell, Woodstock
We receive another nine this week. The nines of the Tarot are the cards of completion, with the tens being an overflowing of the energy of the suit. So this week, we move from the dark visions [...]
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The peace of wild things by Wendell Berry
When despair grows in meand I wake in the middle of the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come [...]
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Hymn of the Forests (excerpt)by Fiona McLeod (William Sharpe)We are the harps which the winds play,A myriad tones in one vast soundThat the earth hearkens night and day –A ceaseless music swaying roundThe whole wide world, each voiceful treeEchoing the wave-chants of the sea.
For even as inland waves that moanBut break not ‘midst the unflowing [...]
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 | Sun in Pisces 29 degrees |
 | Moon in Capricorn 20 degrees |
