“Blessed are we who seek to know the whole
of who we are:
The gifts The limits
The light The shadows
The strengths The weaknesses
The saint The sinner

Who know, accept and seek to live in truth,
Who readily say ‘I’m sorry’ and learn from mistakes,
Who seek the good for all creatures
in the finitude of possibility.

For the weight of harm caused
bears down heavily.
The heart so burdened
cannot sing.
Strength is sapped,
the will paralysed.

Only truth sets us free,
truth and forgiveness,
the deep and gentle acceptance of condition,
the slate wipen clean
to permit love to be writ anew.

Let all burdened seek truth and freedom,
attend to the consequences of choices,
extend and accept the balm of forgiveness,
and face into the future with hope.
Love is come again.

In the depths of silence
and the words of the wise,
our hearts are instructed.
This is the invitation; heed it well.
For torment need not be our lot.
Trust in steadfast love
and the power that moves in all things
to give life.

Be glad and rejoice.
Love is come again,
And again,
Forever.”

Psalm 32 Redux by Carla Grosch-Miller

“Birds and another animals begin to choose their mates as the growing year burgeons strongly in the strengthening sunlight. The green fire that runs over all the earth is sparked by this very sunlight and the deep germinating power of the earth. When plants reach toward the chlorophyll pigment within each leaf so that it reflects green. This pigment alters as the year progresses, causing the leaves to change colour, but from this time forward a medley of greens is apparent.

This green fire is also within us – not in our physical bodies, as it is in plants, but in our emotional and creative lives. Spring fever has many manifestations, some almost hormonal. The creative urge of spring brings into being much verse, for example, as our emotional upheavals reach out for fresh life and vigour..

Where is the green fire in your own life at this time? Take your emotional and creative temperature; then give yourself over to something pleasurable and enlivening this week.”

From The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year by Caitlin Matthews

“Choice is your greatest power. It is an even greater power than love, because you must first choose to be a loving person.”

Caroline Myss

“The world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in music.”

Rabindranath Tagore

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.”

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963), poet, born on this day

“There is another game of hide-and-seek that the Great Mother plays. This is more like a fairy story. She hides sometimes in other people. She hides in anything. Any day you might see Her eyes, just looking into mother’s, or playing with a kitten, or picking up a bird that had fallen from its nest. Under all these forms you may find God playing at hide-and-seek!
When there is something to do for someone–Kali is calling us to play. We lave that play. She Herself said once (She was hiding in someone, and He said it for Her). “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, My little ones, ye did it unto Me.” Is not that like a fairy story! And what funny places She, the Great Mother, can hide in! Another time She said ” Lift the stone, and thou shalt find Me. Cleave the wood, and there am I!” Did you ever lift a stone or break a piece of wood to see what was inside? Did you ever think that was God–at the heart of things? How beautifully Kali plays! You might find Her anywhere!”

From The Story of Kali by Sister Nivedita (born Margaret Noble), first western woman received into an Indian monastic order (by Swami Vivekananda), on this day in 1898

International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims (created in honour of Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered on this day in 1980)

““You can tell the people that if they proceed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize that they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people will never perish.

The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being a defender of the rights of the poor, or a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society … that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history.

When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.”

Archbishop Oscar Romero

Romero predicted his own murder, for this speech was given shortly before he was shot down while celebrating the liturgy. Around the same time, he wrote the American president begging him to cease providing money for the Salvadorian military, which was making war on the country’s citizens. He stood for those with very little voice. He understood the church “is the people,” more than it is structure or hierarchy. He walked his talk and paid the price of martyrdom. Do we continue to take courage from his example?”

From Christian Mystics by Matthew Fox

World Meterological Day

“A small but persistent discipline is a great force; for a soft drop falling persistently, hollows out hard rock.”

St. Isaac of Syria

World Water Day

“When I lived under the black oaks
I felt I was made of leaves.
When I lived by Little Sister Pond,
I dreamed I was the feather of the blue heron
left on the shore;
I was the pond lily, my root delicate as an artery,
my face like a star,
my happiness brimming.
Later I was the footsteps that follow the sea.
I knew the tides, I knew the ingredients of the wrack.
I knew the elder, the red-throated loon
with his uplifted beak and his smart eye.
I felt I was the tip of the wave,
the pearl of water on the eider’s glossy back.
No, there’s no escaping, nor would I want to escape
this outgo, this foot-loosening, this solution
to gravity and a single shape.
Now I am here, later I will be there.
I will be that small cloud, staring down at the water,
the one that stalls, that lifts its white legs, that
looks like a lamb.”

Life Story by Mary Oliver

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and UNESCO World Poetry Day

“My blood swims in every
water way, every tributary
between here and the Delta
Layers of my lineage are pounded into
hot red clay, tint the ring of trees,
are hewn across the scarred fields of southern farms.
From the striving metal of plows and guns,
shifting whorls of fingerprint echo across state lines on
train car railings and travelling shoes,
sacks and cases clutched in hands,
rare and luminous keys and pens;
I know our blood runs over and under the dirt;
that our ghosts get louder as you
follow down the Ilinois
Central Line, and along its
connections…
from Mississippi and Tennessee
tracking north
and leaning
on the sun

My family is not a tree, but a river
Four streams in before our story gets lost
in the din of the Mighty Mississippi,
on to ancestor oceans, impossibly vast.

My great, great, great-grandmothers are likely
Mollie
Missouri
Malvina
Adeline …
Features inked out
by the Blackness of their living
Details erased
by the whiteness of record.
I know you are written somewhere: name
and story:
planters’ ledger
colonizer’s census
family bible
newspaper
or grave …
I need to know
and speak your names.”

A Black Daughter Speaks of Rivers by Atena O. Danner, Unitarian-Universalist minister