Anna Cahill

01/10/2024

No one told me
it would be like this—
how growing older
is another passage
of discovery
and that aging is one
grand transformation,
and if some things become torn apart
lost along the way,
many other means show up
to bring me closer
to the center of my heart.

No one ever told me
if whatever wonder
waits ahead
is in another realm
and outside of time.
But the amazement, I found,
is that the disconcerting things
within the here and now
that I stumble
and trip my way
through, also
lead me
gracefully
home.

And no one told me
that I would ever see
an earth so strong
and fragile, or
a world so sad
and beautiful.
And I surely
didn't know
I'd have
all this life
yet in me
or such fire
inside my
bones.
~Susan Frybort~ With gratitude for this Soul Deep Poem

11/02/2023

This is terrific.

“Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women, they can become women much earlier – and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.”
Susan Sontag - “The Double Standard of Aging”(1972)

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Thank you Ravenous Butterflies

05/24/2023

Beautiful….

Her attempt to comfort me seemed ridiculous at the time. But years later it showed me how I could be there for my own daughter

03/07/2023

You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.
But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. ~Margery Williams Bianco

(Book: The Velveteen Rabbit https://amzn.to/3ZqJoE8)

(Art: Photograph by William Hereford)

01/24/2023

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/0124/1350426-mens-sheds-ireland-sustainability-health-wellbeing/

As well as promoting health and wellbeing, men's sheds are also proving to be good places to address environmental issues

01/01/2023

START CLOSE IN

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way to begin
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes an
intimate
private ear
that can
really listen
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own,
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

…

START CLOSE IN
David Whyte : Essentials
Many Rivers Press © David Whyte
….

A New Year’s poem, if ever there was one. Carrying that certain air of self-admonition we all need to go in the right direction, and do the right thing. This piece was inspired by my growing familiarity with Dante's 'Comedia', particularly the first lines, written in despair after being exiled from his beloved Florence. It reflects the difficult act we all experience, of trying to start again when everything has been taken away; the necessity of stepping bravely again, into what looks like a dark wood, when the outer world as we know it has disappeared, when the world can only be met and in some ways made again from no outer ground, but from the very center of our being. The temptation is to take the second or third step outer step, not the first inward one, to ignore the invitation into the center of our own body, often into the source of our grief and our reluctance: an attempt to finesse the raw vulnerability and the absolutely necessary understanding at the core of the pattern, to forgo the radical and almost miraculous simplification into which we are being invited. For a better, truer New Year - the invitation is always, always, always, to 'Start close In.'

…

Woman Walking
Yorkshire Dales
Photo © David Whyte
December 2015

12/25/2022

12/24/2022

12/14/2022

Kalamalka Lake - one more week until the light starts to return….

09/17/2022