We can easily fill our days with activity. We buy, we sell, we move from place to place. There is always more to be done, always a way to keep from staring into the still pool where life is more than the chatter of the small affairs of the mind. If we are not careful, we begin to mistake this activity for meaning. We turn our lives into a series of tasks that can occupy all the hours of the clock and still leave us breathless with our sense of work left undone. And always there is work undone. Better that you should accept the rhythms of life and know that there are times when you need to stop to draw a breath, no matter how great the labors before you. ~Kent Nerburn

kiss and rest and dance and cry and breathe and reflect and create and love…….

What will you give for a taste

of summer’s last sweetness?

This jeweled crown of thorns

rings every path and highway-

No use pretending you

have not heard sweet temptation

chatter through the vines-

taste, eat

Put your hand in the thorns

and come out dripping juice,

king’s purple spread from

hand to tongue.

Reach gently,

or you will find your thumb

full of thorns, and your pail

filled with unbearable tartness.

Reach gently, but reach.

The sweetest berries hide

toward the inside, hidden

beneath leaves barbed like critics.

Balance, if you must, precariously,

held by will and longing from

the net of thorns. If you want

the ripest fruit, relinquish safety.

Guard yourself only with these words-

Peril, abundance

whispered like a prayer

through purple lips.

~Lynn Ungar

liquid gold

You shall be like a watered garden.

~Isaiah 58:11