Aha! Rain.

It's Odin's day … and here in TulseyTown we await our annual, extended period of transitional storms …

While we wait, celebrate.

Today is the birthday of the first U.S. poet laureate, Robert Penn Warren. The poet, novelist was born on this day in 1905 Guthrie, Kentucky.

Barbra Streisand turns 82 today. The singer, composer, actress, director, producer was born on this day in 1942, Brooklyn, New York.

And, Shirley MacLaine turns 90 today. The virtuoso actress was born on this day in 1934 Richmond, Virginia.

Buddha’s quiet proclamation of ceaseless changes are the experiential basis of the truth of “no solid self.” If that’s true, then who is reading (or writing) these words?

Sometimes, the profoundest of lessons are learned from the quietest, most quotidian of happenstance. Suddenly seeing what you might have walked past countless dozens of times. A buck-naked tree, perhaps. A tree whose very nakedness suddenly offers an aha! – Barbara Mahany from The Book of Nature, Broadleaf Books, Minneapolis MN, 2023 and posting for Meditations at CAC, 4/24/24. Get better acquainted with Ms. Mahany on her website.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek – Barach Obama

When it rains, it should be raining

There are at least ten-thousand things

and most all have a voice of some kind.

Most of them, though

can't be specified or enumerated with

by or on a spread-sheet. That said,

it was you I heard

this morning just at sunrise.

There were 17 of you

but you flew as one overhead

all of us headed for the Heron pond,

talking, it seemed, about the day ahead:

Wonderments about your cousins

– the frogs – barking like

the neighborhood dogs

at your graceful, noisy, arrival.

Sometimes you whisper

in the leaves and grasses, and

once, all at the same time,

your thunder

announced that rain

was about to speak.

jb – shared on Prolific Press' Poets' virtual.