Encouragement

This post is like a line drawing done while listening to music and without lifting the pen. (You are bright enough to figure out that analogy...)


Encouragement

When you meet friends again after it’s been too long and discover
that though you’ve both been changing
the friendship grows stronger still.

A day or even two go well after a string of downwards-gray days.
It is a gift gratefully received
nearly untouched by the quantity of sunshine.

People different from you are found to be not so different after all
For they delight in the same insignificant thing that matters,
share the same hope.

Someone shares
a story, a meal, a passion, and with trusting openness
lets you see the remarkable person they are

But these things also hold a mirror to my self,
and they breathe hope –
a reminder that plants do grow straight even as the sun circles round
and that slowly they grow upwards.

for the road

Since I won't have access to the internet this Sunday, I thought I'd just leave you a few poems by Emily Dickinson.

We play at paste,
Till qualified for pearl,
Then drop the paste,
And deem ourself a fool.
The shapes, though, were similar,
And our new hands
Learned gem-tactics
Practicing sands.



Heaven is what I cannot reach!
The apple on the tree,
Provided it do hopeless hang,
That "heaven" is, to me.

The color on the cruising cloud,
The interdicted ground
Behind the hill, the house behind, -
There Paradise is found!

And finally, in honor of my forth-coming journey:

The Railway Train

I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent--
At its own stable door.