Do you know how
the caterpillar
turns?

Do you remember
what happens
inside a cocoon?

You liquefy.

There in the thick black
of your self-spun womb,
void as the moon before waxing,
you melt

(as Christ did
for three days
in the tomb)

conceiving
in impossible darkness
the sheer
inevitability
of wings.

~Kim Rosen

when the sky falls, I forget how to look up sometimes….

inquiry for today~ what do you forget? what reminds you to look up?

standing here

When I want to summon strength and power n the midst of awfulness and hate, I contemplate water. Our ideas of strength so often surround images of things that are hard-like rock or even a clenched fist. Perhaps that’s why we think love doesn’t include strength, just softness. Water can be so expressive, a signal of our most heartfelt feelings. We cry tears of sorrow, tears of outrage, tears of gratitude, and tears of joy. Water can be puzzling, seeming weak or ineffectual, yielding too much, not holding firm. And yet over time water will carve its own pathway, even through rock. And yes, water freezes. But it also melts.

Human beings have always found uplift and inspiration in metaphors, like water, but we also take inspiration from other people, and their strength and resiliency in the face of difficult circumstances- the ways in which they unfreeze themselves and make change.

I want to lift up exemplary human qualities wherever I see them emerge, however people get there, because it is in recognizing those qualities that we remember what’s possible for us.

~Sharon Salzberg