Poetry Allow

ALLOW

There is no controlling life.

Try corralling a lightning bolt,

containing a tornado. 

Dam a stream, and it will create a new channel. 

Resist and the tide will sweep you off your feet.

Allow, and grace will carry you to higher ground.

The only safety lies in letting it all in –

the wild with the weak: fear, fantasies, failures and success.

When loss rips off the doors of the heart, or sadness veils your

vision with despair, practice

becomes simply bearing the truth.

In the choice to let go of your known way of being, the whole

world is revealed to your new eyes.

            --Danna Faulds

                              submitted by Gina Thompson

Poetry: So Much Happiness

~ So Much Happiness ~

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. 
With sadness there is something to rub against, 
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. 
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, 
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. 

But happiness floats. 
It doesn't need you to hold it down. 
It doesn't need anything. 
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, 
and disappears when it wants to. 
You are happy either way. 
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house 
and now live over a quarry of dust and noise 
cannot make you unhappy. 
Everything has a life of its own, 
it too could wake up filled with possibilities 
of coffee cake and ripe peaches, 
and love even the floor which needs to be swept, 
the soiled linens and scratched records... 

Since there is no place large enough 
to contain so much happiness, 
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you 
into everything you touch. You are not responsible. 
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit 
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, 
and in that way, be known.

By Naomi Shihab Nye
It 

Submitted by Gina Thompson

George Elliot on Regeneration

“Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, an initiation through the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish into a new state of being.”