Dogwood and Trillium

   

With crickets chirping to one another through the trees and cornfields nearby, life is happening and changing in every moment. Where is the flower that was here yesterday? What will I look like tomorrow? How can I overcome this habit I've had for years? Does this moment mean anything on this lazy summer day?

If I strive to be present and mindful of the very minute I am in a certain location, I'll recognize that the passing days continue to form weeks that gradually multiply into months and years. What was once a stem, is now a bud, and what is a bud today will be a flower tomorrow.  If by taking this moment, and realizing it's potential, I can change or grow where I've seen something promising sprout out of the darkest ground. Overcoming this darkness takes the courage to break free from a familiar place and further reach unfamiliar terrain that can nourish and challenge the growth occurring.

How can I be still enough to enjoy and experience what I need to in this moment to take that next step? As reminded by a teacher this morning, I cannot leap forward without taking time to be in the place I am presently. Being mindful of the crickets chirping, the honest place I am in, will pull me back to all the swirling activity that has and will happen if only I am ready to take this opportunity to live and create the moment I'm living in.

Finding Hope

In a journey of life where days are sometimes filled up with exhausted hope and unanswered questions it often becomes harder to look forward to any of the days ahead or smile within the time we are living, the present. Despair seems to build in the midst of doubt and hurt breaks along fault lines in our fractured hearts. These seeds of discouragement can be watered by tears of sadness, resentment, regret and are important feelings in acknowledging the challenges we face and know are real. Life can be a burden where so much sorrow can seem impossible to overcome. If we indeed are the commanders of our fate, there is much to see in a full picture of reality that is really life.

What can come from sorrow that arises from within our souls? Can hope and love emerge from the pain breaking along the fault lines within our hearts? Even though these moments of pain shall pass away, the scars in our hearts and psyches can rest with us for longer. When we're walking along through these stretches of road accompanied by emptiness and grief the days seem to have lost their meaning.

Somehow the resilience needed to return to hope isn't that far away. Hope in the depths of doubt, in the woes of fearfulness, in the fear of helplessness. It can grow as we extend our hands in openness to our own lives, to each other. It is surprising how vulnerability takes us from our fear and towards community. Despair cannot be overcome at once, but as the sun shines, a flower blooms, as a rain drop falls, a rainbow arcs across the sky. Appearing out of nowhere, hope emerges, like flight, sudden and lasting. A moment becoming eternity. The light shines as time moves our feelings to understanding that together as a song breaks the silence and silence captures our fears in an encompassing journey of weaving the threads of heartbreak and tenderness together.

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.

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)

A Story Told Is A Life Shaped

One of the first gifts we are given is our voice. It is with our voice that our individual place in the history of humanity is understood by others and hopefully, by our selves. With the voice we're given, we forge an identity that becomes our very sense of what we're going to bring to life over the years we walk across this planet. As children, we are often exposed to the ways others live, the environments of our world, and the people who are our family and our neighbors. It is in a story we find others, we find life, and maybe most important, we find what we connect to.

Growing up, I heard stories that were illustrated by people acting out the actions that tell something about life and as I fell asleep while they were being read by the tender baritone that my dad was given to share with others. During this time, I connected to music that had lyrics formed into stories told as they were sung to a guitar strumming and a banjo twanging. It was the music that had its roots in the soil of gardens, its range across the heart of humanity's experience as the sun rose and set, and that found me connecting to others that are part of life with me.

In a story, we can grow with characters, hear the rhythm that pulses daily in our hearts, recognize our dilemmas and struggles, and continue to ask questions that lead to discovery. We tell stories to children so they can expand the images they have of life in their minds. Imaginations are formed through what we tell them through expressive, vivid, imagery that broaden a perspective and permit a new understanding to form and later be shared to the collective experience that is humanity.

Once a story ends, our place that we put in it, doesn't have to. A part of the story can light a flame or plant a bulb that we can kindle or nurture until it becomes a deep inspiration. We can sometimes only see other parts of life through story. In words spoken we can hear a story in harmony with illustration or in the rhythm that connects our lives to others.  The stories in our hearts from families, friends, other cultures, give meaning and color to the very purpose of life. Their essence touch our soul, reach our minds, and give depth to what we reach for when we sing together to unite as one people in a shared, similar experience, or awareness of what we can do to share life and a light through for each other.

In the story, we see the journey becoming the pages we illustrate. How we use our voice allows us to tell our story as we travel together. We need not tell the whole story of our lives. We can tell the parts that make us who we are, where we are, as we become alive as we relate and understand in new ways in new light whether it's firelight, flashlight, fluorescent light, sunlight, moonlight, or candle light. This is the light of a story, no matter how dark, that we begin to speak out of as our voice becomes part of our stories.

A story can be our bridge to the meaning of our lives built from imagination,
connection to reality, and new understanding.

Growing Up Together

As a kid, it felt like growing up would always take forever, and then once I became a grown up, life never seemed to stop moving faster. When I look at kids playing, laughing, stumbling, and being themselves, I see how precious they are. They have eyes that are full of wonder and awe, and it is the curiosity birthed with questions and open discovery that gives them their unique perspective on life. It seems that this perspective comes from an opportunity founded upon what we give them.

We can give the young people in our life hope by teaching them their importance by listening them We can teach them how to be alive by paying attention to them and then by living fully with them as they grow with us in life. Thus, kids have the unique opportunity to show us the gift of time. Time can be transcendent or it can be stagnant depending on what we do with it. Sometimes the only thing we can do with the time we are given is to understand that it is temporary, but a gift just the same.

Life's beautiful moments can happen as we live with those around us, especially those who will be on this planet after us. We can help them see what makes life worth living if we let ourselves see that it is worth it for ourselves, too. Are adults much different other than what we have already learned about what happens from day to day? Aren't we still the unique persons we were when we first saw the bright lights and stepped into life? Maybe then we can see life with others as all of life.

In hearing children singing together, I hear how young we all once were, and I hear the connection we have to one another. I hear the individual hearts that can work together to accomplish something great, and the hearts that can shape the world with their unique passions and dreams. Dreams, like children must be nurtured and cultivated with the realization that they can be squandered by fear, despair, and loss, although with assistance, we can see how these bring us closer to understanding what we want to accomplish in dreams -- while in children, they are signs that we can help them live and grow greater than the plights that can seem to threaten their futures. We can all learn from children as they grow and change faster than moments seem to contain. Memories are made, dreams are nurtured, and children are grown, and if we reach out to the child who needs us, we can touch their world, and ultimately our own and live beyond the confines of our own reality.

Three things I think everyone, especially children, need to thrive. Love, colorful surroundings, and nature.