Readings
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.
Rumi
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere
Tears create a river around the boat that carries your soul life
Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground,
Carrying it downriver to someplace better
Oceans of tears we have never cried, exist in all of us
Crying has been considered dangerous
It loosens the locks and bolts on the secrets we carry
Tears initiate us into that timeless tribe
of all colors, all nations, all languages
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do.
Show them daisies and the pale hepatica.
Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen.
The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers.
And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries.
And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano.
Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school.
Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.
Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Mary Oliver, Upstream