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!