Welcome Friends

Perhaps you have come over from Anokaberry Annotated. I'm just quiet now, listening to music, sipping this coffee and looking out the window. Notice the light and shadow on the mug, I did. I am so glad for this decision.

A Thread is so Slender

A Thread is so Slender
(for Terry)
by Sue Monk Kidd
A thread is so slender
Yet here I am with one strand of ferocious hope
Afraid it is the last thread
Hanging from the torn seam of the earth,
Afraid we have finally gone and pulled it,
The blue-green world, unraveling like a ball of yarn into the spheres.

Still I go on holding this thread.
I love the daring inside it
How it is always beginning.
It talks to the humblest thing in me:
Why don't you risk everything for hope?
What if one gives birth to two, and two gives birth to three?
Does the universe dwell in a pumpkin seed?

A thread is so slender
And dangerous.
It is a beam of light no bigger than a wire, yet
it holds so many suns,
The way a drop of fire contains the whole inferno.
What if it is a fiber of God just floating about?
What if it harbors inside it the very tapestry that will save us?

A thread is so slender.
It hides in plain sight in the corners of my kitchen,
subverting the domestic morning.
I catch it riding currents in the backyard
like a child gone to play.
But back again, curled on my pillow for the night
pregnant by some small piercing of hope.

We are always having this conversation.
I say: Stretch the world upon a loom,
Let kindness be our warp, gentleness our woof.
May we never tire of this back and forth,
back and forth,
The daily shuttle of loving each other.
There are visions shining in our fingers,
And we will not cease.
We will expand to this moment.

Here is what the thread tells me:
I believe in the loom.
http://www.threadproject.com/asp/default.asp

Yes

Yes
It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out - no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

- William Stafford

a few lines from "By Rail through Earthly Paradise, Perhaps Bedfordshire" by Denise Levertov

Common day
precious to me.
There's nothing else
to grasp.
The train moves me past it too fast, not much,
just a little, I don't want to stay for ever...
I'm not hungry,
not lonely. It seems
at times I want nothing,
no human giving and taking.
Nothing I see fails to give me pleasure,
no thirst for righteousness
dries my throat, I am silent
and happy, and troubled only
by my own happiness. Looking
and naming. I wish the train now
would halt for me...
I could become
a carved stone
set in the gates of the earthly paradise...

a few lines from "The Sun" by Mary Oliver

... do you think there is anywhere,
in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed---
or have you too
turned from this world

or have you too
gone crazy for power,
for things?

meetings

Thursday I bring the Anokaberry proposal to the Library Operations Committee. I look at the button in this picture and I notice that the buttonhole is a little frayed. I guess the button is made of something less destructible than the buttonhole...