Category Archives: Inspirations

The Roundabout ~ Ken Noyle We ride the roundabout, Our penny paidBy some unthanked philanthropist.Round we go, round we go, Merrily we hold the pole–Rise and fall, Drunk with the blaring calliope.Our horse, Our horse has flaring nostrils.Its mane flies frozen in the wind.Its eyes are bold, fixed straight ahead, Its saddle gold, its tasselsContinue reading “A Muse for Monday”

5 Quotes from Books at Hand (a peek at what I do when I’m not at the store): “The post-anthropocentric ethics of expanded obligations becomes a way of taking responsibility, by the human, for various sorts of thickenings of the universe, across different scales, and of responding to the tangled mesh of everyday connections andContinue reading “Musings on a Rainy Monday at my desk”

Swallowtails BY ALLAN PETERSON The Emperor thought of his heart as a water wheelflooding the rice fields of all creationand bloodied the water for a better harvest.His warriors hoped for a life with wings.His swallowtails wrote him the same lines—the secret of life is a resurrected worm—He told them eventually time would run backwardsin their hands,Continue reading “Monday’s Musing”

CHANGE IS POSSIBLE ~ Rob Brezsny Ancient Hawaiians had a sport they called lele kawa, in which they dived off cliffs into the ocean. Pu’u Keka’a, a tall volcanic cinder cone in West Maui, was a perfect place from which to jump, but everyone avoided it. Legend held it was a taboo place: “the leaping place ofContinue reading “A Muse for a Monday”

To be honest, all the inspiration right now comes from the idea of new growth, new beginnings, new possibilities – the soft greenness of fresh leaves, the perfume of a first open flower, the sound of peepers and chattering finch, the buzz of the bumble, a warm spring breeze and a cool night, damp earthContinue reading “Monday’s Muse”

AFTER HALF A CENTURY ~ Chimako Tada Finally after half a century, a clearly observable law has been found:For mankind, all matters proceedAlong geometric lines (If you put one grain of rice on the first intersection of a game board, two grains of rice on the second, four grains of rice on the third, andContinue reading “Monday’s Muse”

book at hand: “Recently I’ve been thinking about the body and bush aesthetics, or just like Indigenous aesthetics, and spending time thinking about mosquito bits – picking berries and picking tea, and like, paying for them with your blood…I was being chewed up by mosquitoes there and I started wondering, do mosquitoes have blood memory?Continue reading “A Musing for Monday”

Moon by Billy Collins The moon is full tonightan illustration for sheet music,an image in Matthew Arnoldglimmering on the English Channel,or a ghost over a smoldering battlefieldin one of the history plays. It’s as full as it wasin that poem by Coleridgewhere he carries his year-old soninto the orchard behind the cottageand turns the baby’sContinue reading “Monday’s Muse for the Snow Moon”

It has taken me a lifetime to understand the nature and necessity of compassion. To see in every person I meet a human being that is trying as all of us do to live a life based on inadequate information and insufficient capacities. There is not a one of us who has not hurt anotherContinue reading “Monday’s Muse, a life well lived: Stephen Harrod Buhner”

Cold moons of winterThe wolf and the stormIce crystals splinterThe long night is bornGrey shadows lopeOver the snowYet still there is hopeThough fires burn low. ~ Pete Crowther