Tuesday, July 03, 2018

First Things: Moon in Day

Moon in Day

Night watches without
a sentinel to shine
or light to guide

Moon in Day

Avoiding the night
refracting away
dancing round again

Moon in Day

Bright summer morning
hanging high
the western sky

Moon in Day

Come again
Shine again
Round again

Moon in Day

We wait again

Moon in Day



Tuesday, June 19, 2018

First Things: The magic of people

Last night I attended a memorial gathering for an old friend of mine from my early days in Detroit.

There are people you meet who, for good reasons, linger with you for the rest of your life. There is a magic about them that resonates with the universe and adjusts our molecules and energies in just the right way to change us for the better, if even we only spend a very short time with them. Chase Chapman was one of those people. My friend Andy Swan was another. Both of them were bright stars, snuffed out too soon.

We laugh, we smile, we talk for a while and then we're off to our own worlds. Before we know it the manufactured stuff of living overtakes us and that bill that you can't pay pushes away a caring word, the overdue report squashes a friendly hello, and the actions of an evil world pauses a confident gait.

We are more than those things. People like Chase and Andy, and countless others buoy us to be better... to not let those manufactured things pull us away from the magic of people, of living, of each other.

Saturday, January 06, 2018

First Things: 2018

Around the start of a new year I always try to take a few moments and journal my thoughts from the previous year and those for the next. On New Year's Eve I jotted down my thoughts about the end of 2017. Today I finally got around to looking forward and in the process was reminded of something I tell myself a lot.

Feeling defeated is easy
Feeling empowered is a choice

It is easy to feel like the world is against you. To look at the chips and see how they did not fall like you wanted. It is easy to see external things as the cause of our problems, issues, defeats, difficulties, etc.. It is true - they DO affect us. We are battered by the world. Life is a hurricane.

But we have a choice to make - do we allow all of that to let us feel defeated - or do we make a choice to take power over one thing? It's easy to rest - but to get up, we have to make a choice to stand. We can choose to have power over one thing and move forward to the next, and the next, and the next.