angelbirdflies

Summer time and the living is easy, Fish are jumping and the cotton is high, Your mama is rich and your Daddy's good looking (this is dad's version) So hush now baby, Don't you cry. One of these mornings, You're gonna rise up singing, You’re gonna spread your wings and you'll take to the sky. But until that morning, There ain't nothing can harm you, With your daddy and your mammy standing by. This was my all-time favorite lullaby.  Sung in dad's gravely voice it carried me to sleep with visions of flight. By the time I was four I knew that my mammy and daddy weren't gonna keep standing by .  So I did what any rational four year old would do, I made up my mind to fly.  I asked Dad about it and he answered, "You can do anything you want if you believe in yourself enough kid."   Well okay then. Our house sat atop a steep hill with a concrete drive, sloping like the metal slides that once populated playgrou...

Some days I need the warmth of connection more than others and when I do it often arrives from unexpected sources: the flight of a cooper hawk low in the sky, a deer’s quiet contemplations, a bluebird on the trail ahead or a loved ones words returned to me.  Today was such a day and I welcomed each offering in turn.  So when a friend extended a story that had brightened her day, I wasn’t surprised to find my dads oft repeated wisdom contained within... As a kid I often worried about what to do and who I’d become in the topsy turvy landscape of human experience.  When I asked my dad about it he told me the story of the two wolves and finished saying, "Don't worry about what to do kid, feed the wolf you want to be and the rest will take care of itself.”  Two wolves  A member of the community goes to an elder: “I am trying to find my way, but I am struggling with the path and within myself.” The elder explains, “Inside each of us, there are two wolves which fight a...

This has been a year of farewells. Dad dying. Son number one off to college. Son number too growing up fast. A body being quirky. But through it all I've had a friend, a ponderosa pine tree. Odd? Maybe.  But I visited it as frequently as any bestie would, walking the requisite three miles up apex trail to sit in its low branches, breathing in the vanilla-orange-pine scent of its bark beneath an umbrella of cones and needles.  Today I bundled up and hiked an hour for our visit only to discover that a fire had blazed along a small stretch of trail in my absence, taking my tree with it.  I stood beneath blackened branches with tears on my face.  Tears for my tree, for my dad and all the changes in a life. Not because there’s anything wrong with change or unnatural about fires, both are necessary and contribute to the health of the system. No I grieved because my friend was gone and I would miss it. Because this tree of all the trees on the trail had become dear to me. W...

i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened) e.e. Cummings