Blessings of the Winter Solstice
Christmas and Winter Solstice blessings to all those who have visited Moonside and especially to those to whom I was unable to respond due to physical or mental illness, a HUGE THANK YOU!!
And to all… may you feel the joy of Christmas no matter what your circumstance, color, creed or faith and be blessed by health, happiness and peace in the New Year!
Love, Ellen
Apology
To all of you who have “liked” my posts over the past week, a heartfelt apology and a mighty THANK YOU!!! I would have liked to have stopped by your blogs but am following WAY, WANY too many people and can’t keep up. I keep following more and more people when I am manic and then feel hopelessly unable to keep up when in the depressed cycle– which is where I am now. I am clean out of words, in a downward spiral, and on day 3 of a mighty migraine. Hope you’ll stop by again sometime in the future so I can visit your place.
My Cathedral
is my cathedral
A very diverse congregation…
From cows
to snails and turtles
to gazillions
of insects
Deer sometimes come round
Butterflies abound
Moths, too
Birds of every hue
All that’s missing is you
but you worship your own way
doing charity every day
more than I can say
Starburst
“Dear ones, the light of God is moving through me this day… I am in His sea of Light, in that eternal land. Wherever I am, in this life or beyond, I am always roaming in that eternity. I want you to come there also, for you are my brothers an sisters and I cannot bear to see you left in delusion.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
Resurrection
“From winter’s tomb of lifeless blossoms, thou, O Christ, art resurrected in new buds of roses, marigolds, bluebells, jasmine, and worldful varieties of flowers. Ever-mutating, multicolored flowers of lifetrons growing in the gardens of the astral land are fragrant thrones of thy Presence” ~ Paramahansa Yogananda
Hallelujah! He is risen.
The Backyard Circus
Did you ever stop to think
what it is like
to hang mid-air from a leaf’s edge
or to glide along a leaf
blowing in the breeze–
or crawl upside down
upon veined slopes of green?
or to give’s one’s all
to a loved one
stories high from the ground
hanging onto her for love
and dear life?
*
Such feats go on all day long,
ignored by you–
our talents unacknowledged–
because we are lowly creatures in your eyes
and yet we can do
acrobatic feats
you cannot even approximate.
*
Did you ever stop to think?
The Leaf Devoured
Water droplets magnify
the verdant veins
through which
the life giving blood flows
through which
the life giving source
that keeps
giving life
keeps
life going
despite the wear and tear
of an alien attack
by a catapulting caterpiller
that offers another creature
a world within world
in which to live.
Despite
bitten tears,
bitter tears,
the leaf will live green
through the summer
and then shrivel to crimson,
life blood draining
and it will cry no more
as it drops dead
from the branch
where it lived
for a few short months.
It’s All Relative
In the land of the giant Lily
the little ant is King! *
Man thinks himself giant, so important, even grandiose, at times,
when, in relation to the universe,
he is of microscopic stature,
less in size than the tiniest of insects
who live in a veritable macroscosm beneath our feet.
(Adapted from the proverb: ” In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
Hooked
You hooked me,
twenty-eight years ago,
with your shy smile
and elusive ways.
I was scared
but you were more so
which made me brave.
I would I had known you all my life
(or even before)
but I feel/felt like I had
although it took years for me to find you.
With your rough hewn edges
you taught me to speak up
when before I spoke not.
I have learned to take care
because you have taught me to dare
and today on our 24th wedding memory,
despite our little irritations and frustrations
as an old married couple,
I am hook-line-and-sinker-
in-love-with-you,
and want to use what time is left
together
to bring one and other to God.
The Infinity of Spring
Light embraces each flower
encasing it in color
energizing each blade of grass,
an infinity of green,
creating the world we see,
the dream screen
photons of energy
we drink with our eyes,
as our total being,
like the infinity of blossoms,
is caressed by the Light.
Two Lips of Forever Love
He didn’t “get it,
the “loss thing,”
when my aunt died mid-April,
and I lost my second mother.
Didn’t “get it” when I lost my first.
This was not the only time
he was lost in oblivion and
puzzled by my tears.
*
He didn’t see me hurting
from the loss of my lineage,
and his lack of empathy for my grief
as he made me meet and greet
a friend the next day, as if all was normal.
This time I balked, bolder and older,
and he agreed it was time to ponder
and talk with his mentor.
*
When he came home
one night days later,
full of hugs of apology,
and tulips on the kitchen counter,
it was a breakthrough for us both.
It took a few days
but what came out
brought tears upon tears.
*
Not having grown up
with emotional displays
he didn’t “get” the meaning of loss.
With no models of grief
he didn’t know how to feel it himself
nor how to give solace,
not just lip service,
to those who had lost.
*
I cried for him.
How very sad, as a child
he didn’t know the love I knew.
He, a sensitive child,
in an icebox family
fraught with frigid emotion,
and warm, deep affection only
from his great-aunt, Dot.
*
He brought me pink tulips,
flowers of a contrite heart,
and held me close
and kissed me
with lips full of apologies
but I was the one
who felt sorry for him
for the years he knew not love.
*
Twenty-eight years ago
God told me “Love this man,
trust him and have faith in him,
and hold him to your heart.”
Many moons later, I love him light-years
more than the day we met
and in then-unimaginable ways
has our love strove for the stars.
*
He has brought me:
kindness and gentleness,
generosity of spirit,
goodness of heart,
and healing humor.
What I have taught him:
the glories of love
and agony of loss.
*
From the beginning
the seed of love was sown
for better or worse
deeply within the parched,
but fertile soil of my imperfect heart.
And he has cultivated the growth
of a stalwart, staid evergreen,
amid the blooming two-lips of forever love.
The Dance of the Croci
Whirling dervishes
of Croci
spinning colors
of violet and orange and green
soporific breezes
brushing the sunlit
freshness of air
dizzying sway of seeds
dropping from trees
my head reels
drunk with the nectar
of Spring
A Glimpse into the Infinite
How many bacteria are on the back of your hand?
How insects are in the universe beneath our feet
or above our heads?
How many grains of sand lie on the beaches of the earth?
How many waves float upon the earth’s seas?
How many bubbles rise up in all the water on our planet?
How many planets, stars and galaxies lie within the universe?
How many universes are suggested by the Multiverse theory?
What seems infinite is finite.
The paradox…
We have a perception of the Infinite though we ourselves are finite.
We have a conception of the Infinite through our perception of the finite.
The spark of the Infinite lies within our finite bodies.
It is called the Soul.
Unity of Being
Carl Sagan, Astrophysicist:
“We are all star stuff.”
Professor Brian Cox, Particle Physicist:
“Every atom of carbon, every living thing on the planet is produced in the heart of a dying star.”
Sergio Toporek, Artist:
The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star.”
Dr. J.S. Bell, Quantum Physicist:
“No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.”
Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist:
“Organisms can never be totally unrelated to one another, since it is all but certain that life as we know it originated only once on earth… Go backwards, no matter where you start, you end up celebrating the unity of life…”
The Beatles, Musicians:
“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
Russell Targ, Physicist and ESP researcher and Dr. Jane Katra:
“… connection has been demonstrated repeatedly on the microscopic quantum level in experiments where pairs of photons (quanta of light) are sent off in opposite directions at the speed of light, but retain a connection, even after traveling many kilometers, whereby a change in the polarity of one photon observed by a researcher in Basel causes a corresponding change in the other photon observed by a researcher in Zurich.”
Joanne Elizabeth Lauck, Author of The Voice of the Infinite in the Small:
“… small changes in dynamic systems produce changes of great magnitude… small events emerging out of this wholeness give rise to nonlocal events, because all is connected.”
Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist:
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
******************************************
Scientists and artists agree. We are all one. They just use different vocabulary.
In my tiny life, I have only found the experience of connectivity demonstrated twice. Once, when my father died in hospital across town from where I was working and I “felt” his death at the minute of his dying. I “knew” it. And the other, when my brother collapsed suddenly in Michigan from what was later determined to be lung cancer, and I lost my balance and fell simultaneously in New York City.
Of course, there are the little syncronicities: thinking of someone and then seeing them a few moments later or dear ones calling each other at the exact same minute, or saying the same thing at the same moment, thinking the same thoughts simultaneously, etc.
It is not just family and those close to usthat are connected to one another in this life (and perhaps in previous lives), but all of life is tied to one another, born of a dying star, born of star-dust material. And yet so often we see the “other” as foreign. As Einstein so eloquently said, this is the “optical delusion” of our consciousness.
We are all connected. Not by cell phones and computers and the social networks, but by the very building blocks that compose us. And, if we can rise above the everyday pettiness, a Herculean feat to be sure, and feel the one consciousness that flows through us all, we could tap into a limitless ocean of empathy, and a unity of being.
The Microcosm and the Macrocosm
Grace flows through the limbs of a tree reaching skyward, its intricate patterns of branches pleasing the eye– just as grace flows through the orderly, spikey branches of frost on a window.
Patterns repeated ad infinitum in all creation.
A microcosm of the macrocosm and a macrocosm of the microcosm.
God’s breath breathes through all.
