“Let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
~ Mary Oliver
Creativity and wellness message for today: Allow for silence and wonder.
Nature’s Flow
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Category Archives: poetry
Reflections, Light, and Shadow
Happy New Year to everyone. I’m working on a series of fine art photographs called, “Reflections, Light, and Shadow.” I only use available light, crop the image using the camera on my mobile phone, and shoot. Capturing natural glimpses, fleeting moments in time, brings out the poet in me, distilling things down to their essence.
Then finding this Rumi quote is the icing on the cake:
“Both light and shadow are the dance of love.”
– Rumi
Creativity and wellness message for today: Be delighted by nature’s design.
Lightness of Spirit
My thoughts today alight on feathers: Feather symbolism has different meanings depending on who you ask. For me, they represent hope, alignment with Spirit, divine protection, poetic inspiration, and profound yet light mystical connections. They also come into my life unexpectedly and offer me insight and strength to try something new. The feather comes as a sign and teaches me to creatively trust what is in the immediate moment.
Others have said:
“In a result oriented culture like ours, it is easy to get hung up on endings, on figuring things out and finding precise solutions. But a true fascination continues building with each new piece of information, making new connections, revealing new patterns and opening new perceptions. The exploration of natural miracles is a fundamentally open ended and curiosity driven enterprise. It reminds us that science is not always about the answer, it is about the questions.”
– Thor Hanson, Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle
“If feathers don’t ruffle, nothing flies.”
– Jessica Raine
.“The soul, light as a feather, fluid as water, innocent as a child, responds to every movement of grace like a floating balloon.”
– Jean-Pierre De Caussade
“Style is the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the cap.”
– George Sampson
Creativity and wellness message for today: Acknowledge unexpected gifts from nature that may float into your awareness.
Understanding Stillness
Happy New Year everyone. I hope you enjoy a year enriched by beauty and wonder. I continue on my year-long healing journey and in order to recuperate I need to be quiet and rest. I am finding these times of solace and solitude restorative. There’s a wonderful book our son gave me for Christmas, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. It beautifully describes the process of tuning inward in order to heal. I recommend it!
And then there is Mary Oliver . . . just when I think I have read all her poems out of the blue a member of my church (who doesn’t know me) sends me one I haven’t read before and it nails it.
The Lily by Mary Oliver
Night after night
darkness
enters the face
of the lily
which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse
of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content
to stand there
in the garden,
not quite sleeping,
and, maybe,
saying in lily language
some small words
we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,
its lips
are so secret,
its tongue
is so hidden –
or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience
of vegetables
and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon
becomes the golden sun –
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?
Creativity and wellness message for today: Be open to the gifts of the day no matter how quietly they come in.
Adair Wilson Heitmann's Blog 