Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Golden Retriever’

Aug 13

The Good Things

“Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they’re thirsty. That’s prayer. They don’t live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.” – Mary Oliver

“Beauty is whatever gives joy.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay

Acknowledge the struggle.
Move through it.
Be patient, especially with your harshest critic, yourself.
Invite and welcome joy to come alongside to lighten the load.
Find delight in simple things.
Holding it all.
Praise and prayer.
Gratitude in the sighs.
Life spins us around.
Take a foothold in joy.
Rejoice in the strands of beauty woven through this very day.

“If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.” – Eleonora Duse

Jul 10

3 Comments

Open Window Day

“Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.” – Dr. Seuss

“What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?” – E. M. Forster

Open the windows.
Put your head out.
Feel the wind on your face, flowing through your hair.
Seize joy at every turn.
Pursue delight in simple acts.
Breath in the fresh air.
Clear the clutter from your thoughts.
Enjoy this day and all that is offers.
There’s wonder, awe and frolic in reach.
Partake.

“I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.” – Leo Buscaglia

Jul 2

Dog Days

“Summer has filled her veins with light and her heart is washed with noon.” – C. Day Lewis

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”― Jack London

Summer.
An invitation daily to delight, play and wonder.
Dive in.
Accept the invitation.
Let these days in.
Live not merely exist.
The proper function of man and dog.
Hear and dance to the song of summer.

“Every day has a story to tell.
Can you hear it?”― Emmanuel Onimisi

“In summer, the song sings itself.” – William Carlos Williams

Jun 22

Summer Fun

“Listen, whatever you see and love-that’s where you are.”― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“The little cares that fretted me,
I lost them yesterday
Among the fields above the sea,
Among the winds at play.”
― Unknown

The gifts of summer.
Long days.
Soft breeze as the sun sets, warmth lingering.
Sun blooming flowers and food.
Farmers markets soon to be brimming with variety, flavor and harvest.
Swimming, fishing, floating.
Slowness and frolic.
Fourth of July.
Long weekends.
Play, relaxation, respite.
Open the gifts of summer each day.
Sacred, holy space of color, calm and ease.

“To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Jun 18

2 Comments

No Leashes Day

“of all the sights I love in this world — and there are plenty — very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes.” – Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

The simplicity of a dog, or two.
To seize the moment.
Squeezing every drop of delight.
Off leash, free to roam.
Unbound and bounding.
Joy on four legs.
Showing the way.
Leaping, retrieving, delighting.
Steadfast, focused, steeped into the moment completely.
May you go off leash today, each day.
Unbusy, awake and attune.
Finding magic in the ordinary by being fully present.
To a leash-free day!

“Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.”― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.”― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs

May 2

Once and Yes

“Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.” – Carl Friedrich Gauss

“My favorite six letter word is
always
because it promises
so much.

My favorite five letter word is
never
because it insists on contradicting
the promise.

My favorite four letter word is
once
because it says it
happened then.

My favorite three letter word is
yes
because I’m just now learning
to say it
to my heart.

My favorite two letter word is
if
because it makes
all things possible
like this:

If not always
If not never
Then once.

Yes.”― Kate Dicamillo

May you enter open fields of joy and run with abandon.
Open to this day and all that is present before you.
We remember the extraordinary and live in the ordinary.
Mark this ordinary day be imprinted with your fingerprint, footprint, embrace.
Ordinary becoming extraordinary.
Feel the earth under your feet, the sky filled with blue and light above.
Make your answer “Yes!” to this day.
Love, be loved, enjoy the journey.

“If you have no intention of loving or being loved, the whole journey is pointless.”― Kate DiCamillo

Mar 24

2 Comments

Too Full to Put into Words

“May I create plain fields by collecting clouds and bedeck them with arching rainbows.”― Suman Pokhrel

“Patience is power.
Patience is not an absence of action;
rather it is “timing”
it waits on the right time to act,
for the right principles
and in the right way.”― Fulton J. Sheen

When I let go of their leashes, the girls running full speed into the open, unbound and free.
Not too far out, they stop, turning back to see where I am at.
Never out of sight but out of reach.
Waiting for me to catch up to join them in frolic and play, ball throwing, field pouncing.
Moving on ahead when I catch up, but not too far again.
Just enough and still close.
Wide open fields.
Big horizons.
Deep blue sky.
Waiting, wandering, joy-seeking and finding.
All available to us each day.
I’ll meet you in the field.
And wait.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”― Rumi

Feb 27

Unencumbered

“Silence is the language of Om. We need silence to be able to reach our Self. Both internal and external silence is very important to feel the presence of that supreme Love.”― Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation

“Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake, a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life…all of our life.”― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World

May you give your mind a rest,
Your joints a stretch to loosen the concrete,
Exercise your face with a smile,
Expand your lungs with laughter,
Open your ears with silence,
Guiding and harnessing your energy, outlook, thoughts,
Unencumbered, untethered, unfolding into this day,
With joy, awe and wonder in your toolbox,
“Reality” will still be there when you return, but you will have changed.

“It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process.

It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher.” – Osho

Feb 23

Break Out

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”― John Muir

“Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.”― G.K. Chesterton

Under the door.
Through the cracks and crevices.
Out through the slit window.
When the doors are locked.
When staring at the same walls.
When stuck in sameness and habitual reaction.
May I stop fumbling at the handle.
Pause to see the same for the first time, anew.
Breaking out into expanse, joy, laughter, beauty, abundance in all seasons, each day.
A playground, the forest, a maze, a wide open field of grace and wonder.
Losing mind, finding soul.
I’ll meet you there.

“The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.”― G.K. Chesterton

Feb 10

Joy Production

“Do anything, but let it produce joy.”― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“…You should stay alive
As often as possible and keep yourself open
to anything out of place and everything
with nowhere else to go, to carry what’s left
of your voice out and beyond, into, over,
and under, past, within, outside, between,
among, across, along, and up and around
and to be beside yourself when the spirit moves you…”
― David Wagoner, After the Point of No Return

Wide open field.
Unbound and ablaze.
Space to wander and explore.
Dancing the dance.
Singing the song.
Present in the present.
May you be efficient, effective in your production of joy, pursuit of awe.
Pay close attention, instilled and alive with curiosity, a capacity for delight.

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”― Susan Sontag

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »