The world is both burning and blooming.

You get the bad news and the sunrise in the same day.

You cry over the headlines,

then you laugh at a baby wearing a hat shaped like a bear.

This is the dual citizenship of being alive.

Rage and reverence.

Grief and grace.

You are allowed to feel both.

You are allowed to scream and still notice how good the soup is.

You don’t have to choose.

Let it all in.

~Karen Salmansohn

we can begin again…

inquiry for today~ what calls you deeper in wintertime?

how we see the world….

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

~Mary Oliver