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Why Wake Early
Hello sun in my face: One of my favorite poets has a wonderful poem and collection titled: “Why I Wake Early.” Mary Oliver is a lover of nature and she wakes early to enjoy it. At the end of this piece you will hear her read this poem. If you do not live in nature, she will take you there. As we begin a time of increasing darkness and colder weather for some, we are reminded of how we must seek light. Put yourself in places where you can get some sun–inside or outside. The miserable and the crotchety: Several years ago I remember I experienced a lack of sleep…
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What Do You Plan to do With Your One Precious Life?
The Summer Day Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do not know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass,how to…
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Forever in the Stream
In the Fall my appetite leads me away from prose and seeks out verse. As the earth turns brown and the trees turn red and gold, it feels natural to reach for the kaleidoscopic lens of poetry. The poets Mary Oliver and T.S. Eliot are personal favorites – her love of nature and living and the cadences of Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Murder in the Cathedral” and other poems. I feel the rhythms of the poor people of Canterbury as they mirror persons left behind in our world. What can I do to better understand Eliot’s powerful cycle of life (renewal) and death? How can I walk in the woods seeing…
