BELLA GRACE FIELD GUIDE

You can buy these just about everywhere.  Lovely little Bella Grace journals with beautiful pictures and writing prompts.  Just my type thing and maybe yours too.  Here are some of the quotes and prompts, if you're in the mood to respond.  We can think our responses, we don't have to write them.  

Not every day will be perfect, but every day will have a perfect moment.  This was an easy one today.  I napped outdoors in the sun.  Oh yes, a perfect 60 minutes.  My husband brought my tea in this morning as well, the sign of a day starting out just right.  

During dark or rainy days how can we add some brightness?  I'm thinking bad-mood days as well.  Even days when we've been hit by a trigger.  I have a yellow cashmere sweater with short, puffed sleeves that I always feel good in.  Also a turquoise bead necklace bought for me on a vacation.  But you might add brightness by baking or creating something.  Or a prayer of thanksgiving for the rain, or for having survived some bad time of life.  What do you think?

What makes receiving a hand-written letter special for you?  I don't get (or send) these often anymore. Cards, yes, but not letters.  But the ones I've saved are precious--the letter my husband sent my parents when our first child was born far from home in the UK.  Our love letters from pre-email college, full of longing.  Sweet notes from a high school boy friend.  A letter to my father from his mother; one from my other grandma to me; one from my father to my mother when he was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.  Are you thinking about what's in your stash?  

Forgive yourself the way God forgives:  late at night and all day long."  This is a quote by writer Sherihan Gamal.  Isn't it the best idea?  Forgive others this way too.  Who do I (we) need to forgive besides myself (ourselves)?  Here are a few more of her quotes that I like: 
        It's hard dealing with a heart that knows what it deserves."   This is a take-care-of-yourself quote.  And third, 

        There's a special place in heaven for the tired ones, those who lived and loved and worked and got hurt a little bit more than others.”   Isn't it nice how so-called inspirational quotes actually are inspirational?  How you can pop onto Pinterest and find positive emotions?  Not the eternal truths, maybe, but after any day's news cycle a simple aspirational statement cleanses the mind, points it in a new direction. Not everything has to be intense.  

What are the things you did when you were younger that made you forget time? "There lies the myth to live by."  So says Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), teacher of comparative mythology.  One of my escapes/teachers/simple pleasures that made me forget time ("time for dinner," "time for bed," "time to leave . . .") was reading.  I read Gone with the Wind the summer before 6th grade, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead the summer before 8th.  Also playing outdoors, of course makes children forget time.  So, my myth of a good life might be reading and being in nature.  What about you?  

What are your favorite ways to instantly make your day better that cost nothing? Oh, my goodness, there are so many of these.  Mine are simple:  go outside, go to a bookstore, post on this blog or work on my collage journal, write a devotion for church, wash my hair or take a bath, get dressed nicely, talk to or text a grandchild, talk to my daughter-in-law, watch a movie with my husband, tend to my plants, iron some clothes that need it . . . .   And, of course, what if we're at the beach?  This afternoon I went out after a storm and gathered shells.  Free and exhilarating. Then made shrimp and grits for supper.  I'd love to see your list!   

Nina Naomi     

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A LITTLE MARY OLIVER WITH OUR EASTER

 

Common Bluets on a Rocky Hillside

"The Veil"

There are moments when the veil seems 

almost to lift, and we understand what 

the earth is meant to mean to us -- the 

trees in their docility, the hills in

their patience, the flowers and the 

vines in their wild, sweet vitality.  

Then the Word is within us, and the 

Book is put away.

Mary Oliver is a mystic poet, open and attentive to the presence of God in the world.  She calls the earth "God's body."   To wit, "It is not hard to understand / where God's body is. / It is everywhere and everything."  "The Veil" is a poem that helps us find God.  When I am in the woods or Duke Gardens or where the ground is soft with pine needles underfoot or leaf litter, or when I spy those tiny bluets that are waving on their fragile stems amongst the spongy moss right now, I can feel the Word within us.  God becomes accessible in our daily rounds.    

Oliver lives by curiosity and her image of death is breath-taking.  "When death comes / like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, / I want to step through the door full of curiosity . . . ." Using biblical language, in the same poem she writes:

When it's over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

from "When Death Comes"

"I believe everything has a soul," she says.  Not a human soul, I expect she means, but its own soul.  The soul of something alive and precious to its Creator.  When we love the world, we please God and give God glory.  In the world's beauty we see the beauty of God.  If we all treated the earth as our sacred home, how healing that would be.  If we did that, we couldn't bomb our home into rubble or fail to respond to its needs. 

One more:

"In Blackwater Woods"

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it 

against your bones knowing 

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Well, no words are truer than these.  We love what is mortal, ourselves and our dear ones, with our minds, hearts and souls.  Nothing is more precious than the body of someone we love.  We stay alive not only for our own sakes, but so as not to cause pain to those for whom we are the gift of life itself.  

But Christ also taught us to let go.  He was able to say, "It is finished" and relinquish himself to God.  Our faith helps us do the same.  Because what we have learned every Easter is that we move from our fragile mortality to our eternal immortality.  In the interim, I am grateful for Mary Oliver and her vision. 

Now, for all of life, let us give thanks.  

                                                                        HAPPY EASTER from Nina Naomi

 

EASTER

I'm so glad it's almost Easter.  The world is Easter-ready.  Today we saw two purple finches courtship-feeding. The male, a rosier shade, delicately passing seed to the female. She, assessing him as a mate for one sitting on the nest and needing a bite now and then.  He was proving his worth, I thought.  He wasn't letting her out of his sight.  He would be a good helpmeet.  

The dwarf red maple is leafed out.  The snap dragons wintered over and are radiant.  Forsythia are just shedding their yellow flowers for vibrant leaves.  Red bud are lining country roads. 

Sundays are marching to Holy Week and ultimately Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter.  I haven't been as attuned to Lent as I wished to be. I didn't go to mid-week Lenten services.  I have been following politics and nursing my getting-worse back. I didn't go to Friday afternoon Stations of the Cross. I worry about Gazans and Ukranians and Israeli refugees held by Hamas.  I worry about our country.  When that's too much, I do Wordle and follow college basketball.  Preoccupations and distractions.  

With all the suffering in the world you would think it would be easy to focus on Christ's suffering and death, but that's not necessarily true.  However, that's what our faith requires of us.  From Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, we move in step with Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem to the Last Supper, the crucifixion and the Resurrection.  

This is what we do.  We will be ready as we are every year.  We will recognize that the suffering Christ understands our own suffering.  We will know that we are not alone.  We will wait at the tomb and see it empty.  We will share an Easter breakfast with our church friends and hide eggs for the children.  We will pray for peace on earth.  We will align our own renewal with the renewal of the earth.  We will face all that threatens our world with the peace that passes all understanding.  That is what we will do. 

In peace let us pray to the Lord.  Lord have mercy.  AMEN 

  

THAT SOMETHING WILD

 Coyotes don't surprise me, their howling far away,

Or closer but not visible.

And yet the dog's alert, my maltipoo.

He turns and waits for me before he leaves the step,

When clocks strike ten and dark it is.

My torch the only light unless the moon is full.

But last night straight across our path a red fox sauntered by.

From whence he came I could not tell 

'Till Wiggles sniffed his trail down to the boardwalk.

It had lain where I had walked that day.

I do not want a fox so close although it carried awe.

A small intake, a taint of joy 

That something wild should freely go

And pass me by without a glance.

And I should live where fox and deer, 

Fat badger, possum, Hawk and owl 

and who-knows-what reside.

All calling home where I call home, 

And none surprised by me. 

Home

GO GENTLY

Go gently when your morning comes and thoughts are waiting prey.

Go gently when the evening falls if thoughts still trembling there.

Go gently if your mind's awry remembering every wound,

From words that drop like nerves gone bad, 

Your shelter out of reach. 

And then you write and say it straight or say it slant

Or don't say it at all. 

The thoughts recede; they have before.

It was so long ago.