Recipe for a sunny winter walk to the beach
Follow the trail
let your feet lead the way.
Allow the wind to blow your hair back, and feel it caress your face.
Re-tune your mind, your heart, your thoughts
and listen to how the chattering background voice in your head
is now silent.
Remember the sound of that beautiful silence,
and come back for more,
soon.
A gray day can run to lavender, sometimes to taupe, and sometimes to an almost blue, or an almost pink. Am loving these gray moments from Flickr artists:
1. Doves on Grey, 2. grey day, 3. Fade to grey, 4. Grey morning, 5. grey, 6. Grey, 7. 'twas a blue~grey shade of pale, 8. greys, 9. Canada Goose - Gray's Lake, 10. One Gray Dey, 11.Gray Outside, 12. ~some shades of grey~, 13. One Grey Morning (a.k.a. Darkness Before Dawn), 14. Gray's Lake Grove - November Fog, 15. The world speaks gray today, 16. Grey Morning
Half-Light
Short days of winter now, and the sunlight neglects my garden.
This afternoon I pulled out last summer's tomato vines,
frostbitten and slimy to the touch.
Dead stems broken off at the soil
too frozen for the roots to be moved.
I remembered when my mother explained
that from the shortest day
onward to spring
the light would stay longer and longer.
My brother and I would stand out in the snow
silent by the back door
aching toes
and wait for dusk to fall,
record the time in a book
we called Secret.
It was February before we noticed a longer day
and by April
we had forgotten the vigil.
Now I stand
in the dusk again, and recall how
if we had not kept watch that winter
the darkness might never have lifted.
-Liz Kalloch
Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn.
Let evening come.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down.
Let the shed go black inside. Let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't be afraid.
God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.
from Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
Outside .:. Inside
Far .:. Near
Cold .:. Warm
Put your right foot in .:. take your left foot out
yeah, and you know, you may as well shake it all about . . .
just because you can.
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes . . .
. . . a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines.
Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.
Get a life in which you are generous.
Look around at the azaleas making fuschia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night.
And realise that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.
