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Readings

wedding

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

funeral

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

gender transition

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

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