O that loony moon . . .
Monday, July 28, 2025. It's the Moon's day … and a silver sliver of her may shine over head after dark and near the west horizon late evening before midnight. Forecasts indicate 100+º for the next three days near TulseyTown. Hot, humid, Southerlies. Thursday, a break.
The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance, beginning with yourself as the magnificent being as you were created and continue to be, and extending to all beings everywhere. Make of your practice a continuous stream. – Jaan Chah, “Make Your Practice a Continuous Stream”
Today is the birthdate of poet John Ashbery. Born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, in his career he received nearly every major American award for poetry.
It's also the birthday of poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, born in 1844 Stratford, near London.
Do you have one of those to-do lists that never gets done? You check off two boxes and three more spring up in their place. They collide and compete for prominence, sending your nervous system into a continuous low-level state of fight or flight. Where is Spirit in all this? What happened to your image of yourself as the serene yogi meditating on the mountaintop?
There is no mountaintop. There is no yogi. There is only beautiful you—taking out the compost and changing the tire, paying your internet bill and submitting your business plan. The to-do list is written in a secret code. If you look closely, you'll see the divine name forming in the smoke rising from the very thing you didn't get done. Spirit is everywhere, permeating everything.-- Marabai Starr
The Loon On Oak-Head Pond
cries for three days, in the gray mist,
cries for the north it hopes it can find.
[...]
you come every afternoon, and wait to hear it.
you sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines,
in the silence that follows,
as though it were your own twilight,
as though it were your own vanishing song.
– Mary Oliver, The Loon On Oak-Head Pond, House of Light, Beacon Press. 1992.