angelbirdflies

'Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.' -   Eckhart Tolle

Here is a newsletter article I recently wrote for school...I thought I would share it with anyone who wanted to read it: I have been an early childhood educator for twelve years and a mother for over thirteen.  When I considered what topic to write about for this article, I had so many competing ideas.  Most of them derived from my graduate work this year and the many things I am learning and practicing in the studio environment.  I started several articles but there remained one topic, more than any other, that demanded my attention and that was the principle of enough love .  Several years ago, I became aware of the slippery slope of too much doing.  As a single mom, I realized how easily I could overlook the quiet and unobtrusive invitations by life to show up fully present.  Each day we are invited to fully embrace the gifts of the moment and savor opportunities to be wholly available with those we love.  As a busy mom I knew that the two pe...

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field.  I'll meet you there.  When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. Rumi  

KINDNESS By Naomi Shihab  Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of...

“You have to remember one life, one death–this one!  To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death,  whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath,  requires only a moment,  this moment.  And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster... (24)”   ―  Stephen Levine ,  A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last