Waltzing with Freya
It's truly Freya's day as we celebrate International Women's Day and a New Moon prepares for its birth .
Yin is the Mother of the 10,000 things. – Lao Tzu
“Adam's final act of naming is to name his wife, Eve, inaugurating the religious basis for the masculine's ownership over the feminine. What we name, we often feel we own. What we name, we feel we understand well enough to name. And when we believe we have arrived at understanding, we stop asking questions. We close ourselves off from surprise.”
― Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, Inner Traditions: Bear and Company, 2022.
Waltzing the aisles at the 5&10
Singer and host of NPR’s Mountain Stage, Kathy Mattea on claiming aging . . .
Love at the Five and Dime. Kathy Mattea
Speed of the Sound of Loneliness … John Prine and Nanci Griffith
Remembering Nanci Griffith
Just Once (in a Very Blue Moon) Nanci Griffith
Tide Turn on a Winter Day
He is all the father was, and what the father was not
grows great in him. – Rilke
Wine dark sea
red dawn sky.
Forever ago a glass calm.
Magenta sails
on a flat earth
incomprehensible as death,
birth bewildering
as the woman bringing it
from wherever the wind is born,
inconceivable as a round earth
conceived
in the imagination
of a mother's child
on a chilly hillside shore
playing with stones.
– jab
The silence of a fifth day . . .
It's Freya's day … The Redbud tree across the street is in bloom next to the yellow Forsythia, and the Spring rains have begun in Okieland providing a thorough soaking of the mailbox...
In the indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brothers of Creation, so like younger brothers we must learn from our elders. Plants were here first and have had a long time to figure things out. – Robin Wall Kimmerer writing for today's “Meditation” from the Center for Action and Contemplation, in Albuquerque.
“Now I know that uncertainty is the greatest miracle of all. When we hold ourselves open to the possibility of error, a blessing can arrive that we never imagined possible. The oceans can part and offer a way forward. A question blooms season after season, yielding new flowers, new ideas. But an answer is solid. It bears only one fruit. And very often, it is the wrong fruit.” – Sophie Strand, from The Madonna Secret, Bear & Company (August 15, 2023).
“Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”
― Jane Hirshfield
On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers. . .
The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away. . .
Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.
They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.
– Jane Hirshfield, “On the Fifth Day,” from Ledger (Knopf, 2020).
Hagrid's advice after Márquez
It's Odin's day … Spring thunderstorms are in the forecasts for Okieland overnight tonight . . .
549 years ago today, Michelangelo was born on this day in 1475, Caprese, Republic of Florence, Italy.
405 years ago Cyrano de Bergerac was born in 1619, Paris.
In 1836 The Alamo in what is now San Antonio, Texas, fell after a 13 day seige by Santa Anna. Texas still haven't got over the myth.
And, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez, was born today in 1927 Aracataca, Colombia.
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
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Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
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Just because someone doesn't love you as you wish, it doesn't mean you're not loved with all their being.
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Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
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The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.
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– Gabriel García Márquez
"It does not do to dwell only on dreams and forget to live” – Hagrid to Harry, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling.