Where A Day Becomes Our Life

A day that's full of color grabs at us. There is so much to stimulate the senses and make it easy to feel fully alive. Sunrises begin our daylight hours and sunsets finish the hours where the sun is fading and starting a new day in other lands. It is a wonder how white light forms all the color that we can see, how six notes create all the music we know, and how each day connects us to every bit of time that has been lived and is being lived. People are out there living tomorrow in Australia from my vantage point in the Northeastern United States.

The roots of our lives that grow into what we see, what we hear, and what we do, create, feel, and know become much more when we bring them together. Like a meal filled with new and favorite foods, a dance with live music brightly playing the rhythms and harmonies, or even a sporting game where two teams compete for the goal of completing their task of winning against their opponents there are places we have in bringing our collective experiences into one place, where the kaleidoscope and panorama of memories form, and where a day becomes our life.

Anyone who has savored the sumptuous flavors of meal brought together from scratch in the company of loved ones may have felt how the variety of textures and voices provide a moment of joy in the midst of all of life's happenings. There are the tales of old, recipes, jokes, hopes, and memories, all forming an assortment of smiles and wonder. Gathered together on holidays and week days, our lives form from what we fill them with. In days where we are reminded of the shock of human suffering inflicted by hands and lives nearby, we need to be alive to one another by being present to our needs for friendship and love. So as we meet our neighbors and friends, try to understand our family, and hear what today has brought, we can see our wounds that have fragmented our neighbor's lives and embrace with the hope that cannot be made alone. We can be together in understanding after we listen, as others may have been there for us, so that we can continue to make a way out of our experiences. This way begins the vision of courage of creativity formed from imaginations and memories to hold the world.

It may be that days before us that make us who we are today, but the present can give us most of all a place to dream, feel, and live in ways that matter to us or ways and those that we want to give a try. I've recently been reminded of the warmth inside that can tingle when the cool air rushes by as I spend another wintry day in upstate New York. The sharing of these ruminations feels like a rambling engine as my experience spins out like yarn being knit or crocheted into something more; a fabric of memories filled with color and connection. In the reaches of any period of time shared, time can disappear, flowing through our hearts as it becomes stories; our way of preserving memory and our connection to the future.


                                        

Catching A Meteor Though It Falls

As the days pass, the years somehow do, as well. I began writing this blog in part to remember that the presence of each moment in our lives can have the potential to help life become something beautiful and real. This experience can happen anywhere with anything, and is often unplanned and surprising, but also lasting and memorable. Then time doesn't have to go so fast, it can go at the pace of the moment as we live and breathe and take it all in and be alive in its memory after these times have long ended and are returned to in photographs and reminiscences. 

Have you ever waited for something for only minutes or seconds? The time seemed to go slower than when you were living every moment as we looked forward to the rush of life continuing and building with fun and excitement. What about the seconds that you feel something wonderful come over your senses? The moment that we feel that contentment or that understanding that even the imperfection of life somehow settles with the laughter and peace is the time when our life comes together and eases our heart.

Holidays do this for many of us. They serve as reminders while the traditions we carry out on these special days give significance to our lives and memory. The rhythms of daily living can be monotonous and routine without much wonder and excitement. As mundane as things can be, stunning surprises can occur if we are paying attention in the present. A meteor falling only lasts an instant, a beginning of something happens only once, and even as life moments seem to occur in patterns, every day can have a flash of memory and wonder.

At a recital I attended recently, a violin and cello duo reached and soared into the colorful art in the windows and walls illustrating a portrait of the past to present listeners that were able to feel the movement of emotion and life expressed in music. The different sounds harmonized like textures of a landscape bringing me to distant lands and triggered feelings I had never felt. Such an experience would be temporary even though it would always be with me in memory. It also becomes lasting as the quilt of moments grows and colors the soul.    

Hope When It Is Dark

"Why does it take catastrophe to start a revolution?"  - Jonathan Larson

As I write this post winds and rain chase the landscape into a tumultuous flurry of hurricane and storm along the eastern coast of the United States. The potential and expected damage created is a source of uneasiness and uncertainty that strike at different moments in our lives. There can be wonder and curiosity in the midst of great suffering and loss. Devastating emotions or events can remind us about what we hold dear to our hearts, or challenge us to think about what is most important. They can shred our stability and hope into worry and fear, panic and anxiety that make us wonder how we'll ever get through.

How can this suffering be beautiful? Tears fall across our faces and our hearts continue beating with emotion that is fully raw and fully alive. How can this be beautiful if we are left alone? Where is the goodness in life when we are shackled with grief and the seeming never ending presence of calamity? Even as the storm comes and with it, expectation of and then the physical reality of damage we can find hope from the disaster. Some storms come with less warning and then change the course of the lives affected. Still how can any of this create hope, instill love, become strength, or be something positive?

We often light candles after the power goes out and it gets dark. The shining beams come through places of destruction and despair to offer hope and a way through the darkness. The candlelight we illuminate inside provides more than a symbol of promise; it creates a way to see what storms have done, and what can be done together when we share our own lights, our own stories of reality. The light we have may sometimes flicker, but if we trust it with those close to us we will not be alone. We will begin to trust again and stand together as we prepare what has been lost to grow new beginnings and new memories as we all are strengthened by togetherness.

Painful realities are hard to bear especially as suffering seems to grow and affect multitudes where communities fall apart and homes are ravaged. We often question whether or not we should stand strong and work to overcome when afflictions may appear to come more and more often. The candle we lit may go out, we may lose our voice, our heart may become overwhelmed and life may change with tragedy and wrongdoing.

Disaster may strike, but if we light the hope and the way or find someone that has already done so, we can stand together in friendship as our candles can warm the lives of those around us, as our candles light our hearts so we may feel ourselves giving and receiving in the unity that comes out of brokenness. It is then we can remember the continued strength that is found when we trust ourselves enough to rebuild and grow stronger from the scars and the pain that we faced in understanding that pain will always affect humanity. This is how the night ends while hope and love become the new light of dawn. With a song that comes from one heart that reaches our souls and becomes a chorus of light and hope from the soul as we empower one another in times of human need.

E Pluribus Unum - Out of Many, One

Sometimes I look at the lives around me in the depths of reality today, the depths that come from the places I walk, I hear something quieter than the breeze. I hear a heartbeat that beats on a day that takes its place in a string of years and seasons that have created me to help shape the experience of today. I see the inspiration that struck wonder as it filled my eyes as a child and feel the shiver of joy that life is greater than my own experience. It sometimes shapes the spirit of the experience of a team, a country, a family, a friendship, that together we are one, and together we can be alive and make the future out of this. A future that can be harmonious if we dream and act together, if we hear the heartbeat of our neighbors and trust them to hear our own.

The trust and vulnerability in connection from community to friendship is fragile, yet precious as we feel or begin to sense the togetherness that helps us feel our embrace. It is difficult to know this depth even imagine when we have often known fear, despair, loneliness that has been bred from disappointment, discouragement, and exclusion. We know that exposure may take us further down the road of pain that we've known. So how can my life and your touch a life where we may see the hint of a smile? How can we build community and friendships when we have only been disappointed?

I think hope and heart can be grown from vision and feeling. Feeling that life isn't always the sunshine of smiles and laughter, but sometimes the numbness of past trauma haunting our present. Sometimes it is the continuous rainfall that floods our feelings and overwhelms us with discouragement and washes out the work we have done together. When a tragedy caused by human hands shatters our community, does it fracture everyone irreparably, or does it give birth to healing?
Healing that creates a scar to help us remember what we have gained, what we have grown, and taught by one life who's ripples still touch our lives as the memory of a life is carried always. We can sing and hold those close to us, and even those we have just met, to continue to build on memory and what we have.

These are the roots that can hold the soil where we grow together. Roots are the friendship and connection where we grow. Tears of remembrances and sunshine of continued hope and an embrace grow and help enrich the community that has blossomed from shared memory. Fear is real, but hope is true, where we hear the voices we have together. Voices from the soul that we feel growing from scars and wounds, and also from new beginnings, from forgiveness and from our lives shared with friends. There, barefoot, we can feel and hear the melody with the rhythm of our heartbeat join in community. The spirit of unity begins with one heart, one friendship that is shared over a lifetime, and one collective experience of unique perspectives and beginnings that are always the continuation of our growth.

Autumnal Colors

My eyes have begun to lift higher as the Summer's vibrant hues begin to fade into wind tossed changes in Autumnal breezes. The skies are filled with the textures and colors of the earth's arbors, the gardens of melody that are played by the symphony of songbirds as their flight choreographs in the days and nights. Daylight shortens in bittersweet fashion as we gather collectively to watch the skies and change with the leaves as we reflect, remember, and return to new times. These seasons in the Northern Hemisphere are opposite of that in the South as the North provides the canvas for those in the South to see. To me the end of September is that ambiguous time where Summer and Autumn in transition from one to the next continue as nature's gentle way of saying come with me and change.

Recently I watched the skies open up as rain and wind poured out over the fields and the roads.  The changing of the seasons ever dramatic as the season of growth becomes the season of harvest, the season of gathering and being together in preparation for Winter. With the rain bringing in the cooler weather, I continued to look to the skies for the heavens become our connection to the universe. They create a drama that spreads out across the continents and over the oceans that extends to reach us as we live amongst the flora and fauna that helps color the atmosphere of our planetary home. 

The sky is filled with movement now. Migratory birds form their flocks and head towards warmer regions flying, dancing, with the wind in the shifting change of daily reality. The soul of a planet, in rain, in snow, in hurricanes, in fair blue hues, and rainbows as they fill the skies with momentous displays. With the wind bringing in aromas of apples ripening in orchards and water vapor cooling breezes while hot air balloons take flight, while candles flicker in remembrance, while we point to our loved ones the lights of stars and clouds that form the wondrous shapes of memory, of our home.

It can be the sky in Autumn that takes us from the restless days of Summer as it gathers us with a blanket and guides us to feel at home in the changes life has brought. Or it can helps us  feel at home in the new beginnings of every evening as night showers us with stars and birds sing to us as they come and go in a seasonal lullaby. It is not goodbye, only the cluster of our hearts and souls walking and waking, slumbering, and inspiring as we feel something anew in the colors of the skies. 

Feeling the Heartbeat of our Lives

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." Helen Keller

There is a rhythm that exists in each of us, beating like a drum, ringing like a bell, circulating and moving together with every living thing. What is felt with one heart can convey the human experience. The idea of the human experience may be cliche, but the experiences are real and felt in powerful ways. It was recently on a walk with a friend that I saw again how the actions of others ripple past the immediate interaction that took place in any given moment. The walk itself embodied this, and the understanding of human pain and joy that together in paradoxical ways form our lives. It is hard to understand how sorrow is part of the darkness that fuses angst, disbelief, and sadness to the moments that we wish we could hurry and leave behind. These adversities can be pivotal in helping us feel the warmth when cherished and held with a tapestry of connection.

In the heartbeat of life, we can think about the place we are living in. It isn't always happy or sad, angry or fearful. It usually is a mosaic of the feelings we have about our lives. Minutes become days and moments become memories. Life is a combination of such things. Walking freely with the wind with those who have chosen to encountered life's beauty with me alongside. I've found that in walking, conversation becomes more fluid as it incorporates the passage and change of time and life everywhere.

Laughter from the heart comes from the places we realize and know. As we understand our shared, collective experience as people, we live. Gathered together we can hold hands, for none of us has experienced what another has, but each of us may be listened to and cared for and in turn be a light of hope that beats together if we take the risk to step beyond our grudges and listen. Barefoot we feel what is shaping us, changing us. Barefoot we arise and walk over to the beginning of the next moment. May it be the wonder that makes us cry with hope that together we can build something for the future of our lives and those we love. So it may be these feelings that hold us to the moment to create, shape, learn, live.

A Symphony of Summer

"There is a song, a song without a word,
whispered the wind and I overheard.
It sings in summer showers and the music of the rain,
falling on the growing grain,

There is a song, a song without a word
Whispered the sea and I overheard.
It burbles in the brooks and steams and rivers running clear,
If you listen you can hear...

Listen! you can hear it
Listen! you can hear it
In the echoes of the endless ocean swell.

Treat the earth well..."
- Song of the Earth ~ Tom Chapin


In the morning of a new summer day, a fresh beginning of birdsong and glows of sunshine arrives.  It's a creation of the bursting forth of goldfinches and the buzz of honeybees collecting pollen. In each Summer day the essence of life created in Spring bursts into a blaze of life in the motion of synergy, in the strum of a guitar being played on a front porch as the travelers pedal and whirr past on bicycles, and the fragrant combination of barbecues, sweat, grass clippings, rain, and flower gardens becomes a collage of the senses.

The passage of time seems slower. It's been said to be lazier, but it's a time to let the heartbeat of humanity reverberate in our movement along the way. In a summer of dry weather in the United States, it is a time to hear things differently, to hear the mourning doves crying as the day becomes the cool blue night and to awake and paddle out onto the water and see ducks feasting together just after dawn. It is here we find the uniqueness of each day that forms each year and each life.

The spirit of togetherness surrounds us in nature and neighborhoods. In a field of wildflowers and shrubs I passed on a bike ride recently, a cloud of goldfinches and starlings begin chirping flying over the flowers and filling into the sky with color. Their songs distinctly unique, even in unison, can give us a sense of community with nature, with those we love, with the places we live.

We hear the passage of the trains as they roll through our communities and see the jet streams that connect us all through the skies. These sounds, echo with our heartbeat as we move with being. The being that can be felt with our bare feet, the untapped experience that ultimately adds a picture or aroma to our existences, to our lives. The movements of this symphony are found in the screaming of young children flying on swings as they take off and feel the exhilaration of the moment, the fiddles singing into the night as dancers and old friends gather to feel their souls together, the quiet melody of a choir singing the memory of those lives who have been a part of ours but are now memory, and the walks with loved ones where we cherish what is held with dear trust and grown in the minutes of laughter and wonder.

As the last full month of summer draws to an end, its sunset is not the foreshadowing of nightfall, but the transition into Autumn. The fall leaves and period of change, of settling, and final foraging of the summer's warmth before we bring out the blankets and hooded sweatshirts. Summer will be missed, but the symphony continues and evolves as new instruments join the flock to continue each measure in the harmonies of the harvest.

A Path For the Heart

The road less traveled is often quoted when one is proud of the unique path they have chosen. To blaze a trail or follow the way with less footprints often gives us a journey with a more complex landscape. If life were a musical composition, we could either follow the melody line or expand on what is simple and elaborate on the tones and tempos as the music notes rise and fall. This is more than taking a short cut to make something easier, this is taking a path from what opens our lives to creativity, connection, and challenge that helps us live a little bit more and understand that sometimes it is the path to hearing our hearts and our  history.

We often have to take a detour from the path we were taking because life is always under construction. The detour can also be our choice as Robert Frost's poem explains. When we take off our shoes and creep forward towards the frontiers of our comfort levels, we become pioneers discovering how surprisingly beautiful a life can be lived when it isn't always planned out. To some this might be wanderlust, others improvisation, and without both we cannot chart new waters in our lives.

Improvisation. As a part of art or comedy or music, I think part of it comes from an inner restlessness that comes from being tired of the same old routines or in other words, boredom. Another part probably comes from the reaches of the human spirit - exhaustion, terror, rage, inspiration, speechless experiences that can only be evoked through the stirrings of the soul that come out in art. It seems to be the way of creativity, the way of reaching into the rhythm of one's body or one's community and moving forward in response to these pulls that guide us down our own road less traveled.

Sometimes interruptions create these forks in the road that give us the choice of how fast our lives are going. Life always looks like it's going fast when looking through the photo album and through the rear view mirror, but that's because we're seeing all that has happened all at once rather than over the time it took for us to experience these things. I'm not saying we have to blow all over the place like a balloon in the wind, but I'm thinking that if we release some of our routine to our senses, our surroundings and feel our soul take hold, we can begin to find the beating drum of our heartbeat. With that we can possibly realize the human possibility where peace and harmony based on each of our souls, pieces of the diverse puzzle of humanity can be real as the riffs we play from our lives.

balloon in the wind

fun with photography

your own path by water

or land

Gathering Together

People have gathered together to share the goodness from their lives for as long as people have been around to harvest of the fruits of their hopes and dreams. These hopes and dreams are often visions of community and prosperity; a sense of well being and home. This has allowed them to see and imagine what shapes their interactions, and to form community based on their common needs and experiences.  As a way of coming together to discover and encounter community, home, food,farmers markets are created to form a community full of aromas and sounds, sights and satisfied taste buds, and also the salutations to the new experiences greeting our sense of touch.

Within these avenues of samples, scintillations appear in people's eyes as they meander slowly among neighbors and through the cascade of tents and booths  looking for the finds that will nourish and delight them for sale by neighbors near and far. Life is formed by the stories we tell, the laughter from our hearts, and the smiles as life is made by the hands that grow it.  I feel alive a part of this interaction as important as the labors shared have become our memory that is always an important part of our lives. We fill our senses with flowers and coffee beans and the days loaves from the bakery as music fills the air from radios and performers. It is here we create community, experience our lives and begin our stroll along the hopes of our neighbors.


The day at the market is a day to join with neighbors and strangers, people from abroad, and from our home. To live with the fruition of our lives, to experience with our senses, to know the energy that is raw and creative flowing from our hearts, our tastes, our moments. At the Rochester Public Market in Rochester, New York, gatherings form on Saturdays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays to bring the ingredients together that yield smiles and joy, a time shared, a friend made, a voter registered, and a community built. The markets near you, and the markets near me are in my understanding the connection of the experience we together have in the building of today and tomorrow from the common dreams of yesterday.

Sights at the Rochester Public Market on a Saturday in June.

Where You're Going

"People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know" Amelia - Joni Mitchell 


During this summer, I have been setting my alarm for the mornings where I may oversleep and miss an appointment or scheduled event in my life that happens in the morning, but I have found myself waking up without the alarm even earlier than I set the ring to go off. The morning has often been the beginning of my day, the challenge I have to create the canvas of my life as I direct it and walk on.  A time to hear the ocean-like sound of cars on the expressway. A time to feel life slowly so it doesn't have to slip away so fast. A time to see the day as our life where we live and change as the cycles of morning and evening come. 


Even when we have appointments, we have the time we choose to do something with.  For those of you reading my blog for the first time, this post will be an invitation. I invite you to look at my other posts and think about those transcendent moments you choose to create or those that have just happened. How life doesn't have to be routine, it can be what makes your life matter to you. If you have read this before, I would like you to consider sharing what this thinking has made you think of, or experiences where barefoot life or life lived beyond the realm of measured time where we feel life's wonder and beauty in the comment space below.  


For you, I could be one of those people who may tell you where I've been, or recommend what to do and feel and experience. Yet, I can't live your life, create your beauty. I can only hope to inspire it with what inspires mine. That's why Joni Mitchell's song lyric is so significant to me. It reminds us that we can go anywhere in our hearts, in our lives, in anyway we can at the moment and see what that does to our lives. 


Day breaks, night falls, the cycles begin to look mundane, until we stop and see what made today real to us. Stop and think what changed us, who made us laugh, who we talked with, where we were. 


This is life barefoot. I hope you consider sharing what experiences mean something to you. I hope this will inspire a conversation of inspired experiences and life's awe and wonder. Also, if you have any questions about what I mean in my writing, comments about where I could be more clear, or any other thought that may not be addressed, feel free to ask and I'll respond as soon as I can. 

Along the trail to the summit of Mt. Marcy

Ferris Wheel

These photos were taken and show some of these moments where I feel life is barefoot, though I am often not barefoot when experiencing these things for safety reasons!

Smiles That Change the World

"I say why all the loneliness and why all the fear,  if it's up to me there'll be none of that here."
Joe Crookston

A smile offers a little bit of sunshine that is not only lasting, it can very often begin or create a connection that can spread to all of us. When words cannot be found for appreciation, comfort, delight, pleasure, excitement, and often hope, a smile can be the expression of our feelings for such moments. It is in gladness the present becomes real, and the present becomes our life forming experience that changes our lives; often for the better. Like a birdsong evokes the first breath of dawn, a smile can be that instant where darkness starts to fade into the light.

It is this mystery that cannot be held, even for a moment. Like water running through our hands, we have the moment to create something that is for the moment. Smiles offer a consoling, knowing welcome, an agreement in unison, or a sign that the fearful have seen a light at the end of the tunnel. Even when despair lingers and confusion swirls into our minds or causes chaos in our lives, a smile is that breath of fresh air that becomes understanding. Understanding that there is more than all this sorrow, loneliness and fear.

Joe Crookston sings from his soul, evoking his desire to leave a better world for the generations that will inherit what we leave behind. He doesn't want what he has seen others or maybe even himself face. That's why he sings and asks why we have all the anger and greed that are the seeds of war and poverty. The injustice that tear us apart rather than bring us together can begun to be reconciled with a smile, with a seed of hope from a hand of welcome and embrace.

Yesterday in becoming better acquainted with one of my neighbors, I felt his warmth not from his words, but from the combination of words of friendship and the gentleness of his smile. Once affected by a smile, we are never the same, we feel it in the roots of our heart as we know our lives matter that we too can take the smile we received, and offer it to another as night becomes day and the moment becomes ours briefly to create a way of healing out of this fear and into jubilation and peace.

The sunlight of dawn reflecting off the water as its light spreads everywhere; like a smile spreads hope.

Outstretched Hands

What we touch often with our hands, we feel, and what we feel gives us our experiences of life. We open our hands to embrace our neighbor who is grieving or our family who is celebrating. We extend a hand of welcome to the stranger who seems out of place. We create and build our lives with our hands. Most of all, our hands are often our connection to the surface and depth beyond what we directly sense immediately.

When we cannot walk barefoot, or do not want to, we sense our touch with the way we use our hands and if we do not have the use of our hands, we compensate with how we hold onto what we need. Our hands can create or destroy and the choice is ours in understanding which we will do. Hands are often a symbol for community when they hold an outstretched hand of another person in their midst or for building community through our relationships and our work to make the world a more livable place.  The dance of life is led and followed as it ebbs and flows through the nights and days we form and create in beauty and wonder.

I was inspired to write this post by what I saw in a compassionate action that could not have been done if we did not value the role our hands have in shaping life. In caring for another person in a more difficult place in life, a friend was able to provide dignity and a sense of cleanliness and beauty to a woman who needed a bath. While doing this, she soothed this woman's skin and provided love and care with gentleness and patience that transformed life for both women. This act in hospice care is simple, yet very important to giving and providing life-filled moments. We can beautify our world by holding our hurting sisters and brothers, picking flowers and brightening a dark day, welcoming a new friend into our midst, tell a story that will change lives, and shape our days one minute at a time as our hands direct the path we choose to live.

Flowers picked to fill the room with color.

A New Day, A New Tomorrow

This morning while working my shift as a caregiver at hospice, I stood near the bedside of one of our residents while she passed away. To me, death is a very mysterious thing that connects us to all that is living on this planet while bringing us in more of an awareness of our humanity. The peacefulness of this passing combined with the hopeful and mournful expressions of grief and transition in the life of our resident's family gave me a deeper look at the experiences we feel from the overwhelming emotions of life's permanent changes.  Rains can fall for a long time, but when they clear leaving a misty cloud or rainbow so that the sun can open the heavens to the clear skies above, they show the hope that life can continue to grow and emerge after the water has nourished and strengthened our souls.

Our lives are never just one experience after another. One forms while another one is still continuing to shape our life. It's almost as if the ambiguity that allows us to feel hope at the same time we feel fear is the antidote to creativity that may be stunted by boredom. It creates a greater sense of humanity as the complex assortment of our sensory experiences is our entryway to being our truest self.  It changes everything as the light of day becomes the sunset that bridges the gap between day and night in our temporary moments.

As time comes and goes, moments are found to be measured in what we feel, what we live through, and what we remember.  It's as though the present becomes our forge for memories and our perspective, what we choose to do with what we have and how we learn from our past. As Calvin once told Hobbes as written out by Bill Watterson, "the problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present." Perhaps, though, this conundrum is not a problem, but a chance to take hold and live for the present where everything becomes clear for what has been and what will be in how we experience our lives in our interconnected world.

The rain clears slowly while the sun becomes a source of hope as the love we can feel brightens our fear.

A Time To Plant

As the rain fell today, I thought of the trees I helped plant in Hamlin Beach State Park on Saturday during a statewide event held for New York State Parks called I Love My Park Day. As an initiative to improve the air quality of our planet, the park leadership has worked to plan trees in an area of the park that would become a small forest if the young saplings don't become food for the deer first.

Trees are the lungs of our planet as they regulate the gas exchange in the atmosphere surrounding Earth and provide us much of the oxygen that we need to live vibrant lives. In planting some fifteen to twenty young trees, I began to feel connected. I often feel connected to life when I give of myself to others, but when giving of myself to the planet I felt myself look up to the sky and down to the ground beneath my feet. I was becoming part of more than humanity, I was becoming alive amongst everything that lives.  This was different than paying attention to cows when helping them go through a routine milking. This was giving life to something new that had the potential to change the lives of many animals and people.

In a rural setting along Lake Ontario, trees are homes to animals and closer to the water they protect the land. In planting trees,  I had moments of connection with the land. It had been wet and muddy from recent rains making the planting a messy, yet enriching process. The clean soil surrounding roots that would take in this water showed me the base of life for these young plants much the way we can form connections with those who we have lived and grown with as they form our base and help us know or core or heart.

Planting ourselves in life is a hard process in a world moving frequently with little space for rest. Sometimes to survive we have to plant things in our hearts and our souls if we want to be deeply rooted in life while accepting the flux of movement of the human race. The trees of love, hope, peace, charity, and empowerment can be nurtured by our actions as people are lifted to hold each other as one family. I will write more about experiences that can only be felt by the heart and by the soul of life as the things cannot be felt by the mind once they begin growing in our lives in future posts. It is my hope we can nurture the soil of our lives through our work with what we can bring to life.

Trees growing in the rain. (Note: This is not Hamlin Beach State Park)

Letting Life Bloom

Along the roadside of the expressway today, I saw a garden planted by nature. I was driving slowly and carefully so I could take in the plants that became the landscape around me. A rain had just fallen and left the surfaces of nature fresh with a new moment to help life continue to thrive. In this garden daffodils had bloomed from their stems in a way that show nature untamed by human hands, yet aesthetic and formed to experience life now.

Flowers bloom and color our landscapes and the skies become filled with hues that shine in the sunlight and brighten a darkened day. Their color in the landscapes we live in becomes a sure sign of peace and harmony when planted. In springtime, the aromas bring birds and a slower pace that can slow  down the rush of life. It's as though flowers become our other connection to the earth, because along with animals, their presence becomes part of our own transience.

A flower can touch a life in a way a smile can. They are temporary, but their impact is lasting in the hearts and memories of those receiving simple beauty. A way of touching the heart that a melody of new beginnings and hope can burst forth from the wintry depths of fear and darkness. Overnight, flowers bloom, life changes, and can be given and received as growth continues from within to the path we walk along with others and with ourselves. The flower becomes the color we add to life, when we choose to, and the life that we give when we take a chance and bring something wonderful to life in the present.

The Birth of a Season

Time cannot be captured or harnessed, it can only be lived in and made the most of where we are with what we have. Seasons come into being as nature forms their very composition. Spring has come for the northern hemisphere in 2012, and not without the depth and variation that grew from winter's restless spirit.

As nature brings new days from the darkness of night, it also brings spring, from the seeming emptiness that is winter. Even the sun feels friendlier and less hostile as it begins to blanket the northern hemisphere with more of a gentle touch. Plants begin to grow again, and being among the life that is constantly taking shape opens my eyes and ears to what is about to become a memory.

Since time cannot be captured, aside from in photographs and writings. Maybe in the layers of flora that make the setting for our lives, we can experience what has come and what is yet to be found. It is in transition that life is lived, because even the seemingly static things change. Watch the stars in the sky for a few hours and you can see how they have appeared to move as Earth spins on its axis.

Yet in springtime, we can be in movement as we dance to the sound of the rain falling around us with the movement of our bodies with nature connecting us to this changing time. We can smell the aroma of violets grown wild and free and let their growth inspire us to live vibrantly and fully. We only have one life that we choose to form and react to in a multitude of ways. As colors form in nature, emotions flow in life, unexpectedly and beautifully as they transpire. With the expression of our connection, we can live in the changing times and see the opportunity to make something with the chance to reach to the steadier moments and let our choices fill our lives with wonder.

Growth nurtured by interconnectedness.

Wild vegetables grown by shade and sun, affirming the need for the dark and light.

Color bursting from the end of winter.

Last year's growth enriching the soil for a new year.

Reaching out of the ground that was scarred by winter's touch.