"Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at once.
  But it is your guest for a lifetime."

    

January 9, 2012

"Forgiveness makes whole both the forgiven and the forgiver."
In forgiving those who have wronged us, we forgive ourselves for our wrongs of the past.
Someone who forgives others, forgives himself too."

That's a prayer I want to keep saying.
Let me forgive, others and myself.
 Amen.

"When we forgive we wipe the slate clean.  We choose to live not in remembrance of the past, but in the present."

January 5, 2012

 In the "city of the shining jewel,"
 we only look with heart
 and as Epictetus wrote, the universe is but one great city, full of
beloved ones, divine and human by nature, endeared to each other.
I see you in this great city, this universe,
in human life, and in divine life,
you strengthen your bond to me
each day, moment by moment.
and when I see each person I meet with heart
I feel your love, and I travel to the city of the shining jewel.

july 18th

I dream about going to Switzerland in winter,
 a pilgrimage to the snow and everything white.

I would stay till late summer
and climb the Matterhorn.

I would go into exile in the Alps with the mountain rocks
and look for ancient sugar dwellings.

I'd climb mountain after mountain until I found
someone young and I'd ask them to tell me the secret
about how to live on the edge.

 In Switzerland, everything would be fixed by understanding geometry
 and the broken parts of myself would find a way
 to mend in the snow.

July 11th

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them”    Stephen King

Maybe it's all right I did not say all the important things I thought I needed to say.
Maybe the words were not the thing, it was in the silence. a world was there.
Words would have diminished it.

I pray you know the way I felt and feel.
I pray you know all.
I pray I can release myself from what might have been, what could have been said or done
and rejoice in the beauty of you
and the love of you.


You are the song I keep singing.

july 11th

It's not a prayer, more a question, Oh God, where are you?

It's as though every day is your birthday

and I bring a bouquet of marigolds and long to place them at the feet of your soul.

Then I wait for you to arrive in a rainstorm of light.

When you don't it's like someone stole the slingshot that would shoot you back to breath and earth

 and now you drift along a heavenly prairie without sleep.

july 5th/ Anniversary

On this day in a backyard garden in Brooklyn
you married my mother sixty four years ago,
 your face full of seriousness and responsibility

My mother held onto your hand all day.
She was nineteen, girlish.
that first date she took you for a ride on a bicycle.

She was your happiness you said,
always seeing life as good.

You, more tragic, more poet,
war had already crowded out the good and the innocent.

If you're here,
send us a bouquet of roses.


 I want to believe you are here, somewhere between the air and the sun,
 close at hand, reachable.

 I have an image of reaching my hands out to you,
 but my hands always disappear into the air, your form escapes.
 I can't hold onto it.

 It's another prayer of surrender, I'll keep knocking at surrender's door,
 one day she'll let me in.

  I pray for the beautiful soul that you are
  to travel wide open to all.