Wednesday Wish (53); Feed the Birds

photo courtesy of peter myska via www.vivanatura.org

She comes when I need her, her gentle cooing reconnecting me with the softness in myself. I didn’t know I wasn’t breathing deeply. I didn’t know I had put new layers upon myself. I didn’t know the world was hurting me, squelching my sacred song. Until she came. To remind me.

Her feathers are green, or are they blue, and is that yellow, too? I can see her heart beating, feel her beautiful vulnerability from afar, for she is so very much alive, so very much filled with her own sacred song.

Does she still visit while I am away? Will she wonder where I am? Or does she already know? Does she send her sisters of the North to visit me here, on my new island home? Yes, I think she does. And to honor the gifts she has given me, I will feed the birds…honor our sacred gifts of song.

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May the birds you see this week remind you of your own gift of song and may you realize that you are the only one on this earth that can sing your own sacred song. 

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer.

It sings because it has a song.

--Maya Angelo

Wednesday Wish (52)

photo by ziduswong via google images

The sky was so black she imagined painting its edges a swirly neon blue with a big, thick, sable brush.

A picture frame

For her dreams,

Hers and yours.

For she had you in mind.

Every Tuesday night.

For 52 weeks. A year?

Yep, a whole year of wishes

written in the dark of night with a backdrop of dreams and a belief

in the presence of... magic.

Most nights were warm, cradled by the pulsing Mexican earth and soothed by the wind of the rugged Pacific sea. She murmured quietly to herself, feelings that came by way of colors and scents, emotions that journeyed not just up from within but like shooting stars, too, from the outside--to her heart. She listened and watched and honored what was. She sensed and let those senses guide her along a new path. Unlit and made for two. Just You and She.

Sit with me a while, just the two of us beside this sandy nighttime sea. Let me feel your hand in mine and let me tell you once again how much I love having you here, by my side.

Can you breathe in to feel the salty air tickle your tongue? Do you see the moon reflected off the peaks of little waves, those that lap up onto shore, gently loving on your bare and tender toes? Do you feel your skin glisten in the heat of the night, in the magic of the Mexican sun? And do you wonder why you ever worried? For here, not a lick of ugly can find your open heart.

I tell you a story. Of a fisher queen and her seven daughters that frolic at the bottom of the sea. And then another of the night goddess, who searches all night for her lost lover, her tears dropped as dew, dried up by the rays of her rising son. We smile and giggle, sparkle-eye and cry, and the warmth of our hands, together, reminds us that connection plus imagination, equals magic. Equals…love.

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This year of wishes has given me far more than I could have ever given you. You see, every time I gave you a wish, a thousand more appeared like kites in the nighttime sky, begging me to string-pull them in. Gifts from you. Kites of love you grew in me.

So this week, on the anniversary of a year of wishes, my wish is that you share your own wish with someone else.  Any wish, to or for, anyone else.

Connection begets imagination, begets magic, begets love. Watch. A wish to share so that you’ll see, just as I have, the beautiful gifts you have given me.

Sunday Interlude

Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you 

If you're young at heart. 
For it's hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind 
If you're young at heart. 

You can go to extremes with impossible schemes. 
You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams. 
And life gets more exciting with each passing day. 
And love is either in your heart, or on it's way. 

Don't you know that it's worth every treasure on earth 
To be young at heart. 
For as rich as you are, it's much better by far 
To be young at heart. 

And if you should survive to 105, 
Look at all you'll derive out of being alive! 
And here is the best part, you have a head start 
If you are among the very young at heart. 

Songwriters: KING, RILEY B.

Wednesday Wish (51)

photo by richard kehl via flickr

Richie felt so deeply that his shield wasn’t invisible like so many. It had a lovely patina from all the storms it had weathered and it even breathed out a warm rusted scent. But it wasn’t permanent. It was just a temporary, as-needed shield. So sometimes, when I perceived with the Me in me, I caught glimpses of the He in he, too. They found me like playful, magical, extra-sensory twinkles….a moonbeam through the clouds or a silver of an exotic tropical fish. He was beautiful. And extra-ordinary. And his imagination grew mine.

I wasn’t allowed to take his class. My profile didn’t fit the mold. Maybe that’s why he let me in. Maybe he related better to people like me--a spiral in a line-laden world. Whatever it was, non-art major me was somehow admitted into an upper level art-major-only class, Richie’s class, a class I still carry around with me all these twenty-something years later.

He invited me to make a zero backwards, to creatively express my definition of my Self, and to make slides of different ways of seeing every day things. Like Bach stretching the brain through the pianist’s fingers, Richie stretched my imagination through colors and textures and wild, yes, WILD ideas. Nothing that semester, nothing mattered more than riding the waves that Richie set before me.

photo by richard kehl via flickr

He fed the whimsical spirals in me, the bird that longed to swoop and soar and make her own path in the sky. He gave me guidance to trust the wind as it took me, showing me, without any words, how to ride that wind to places I had never before seen. And he did it all with invitations to see with fresh, innocent eyes. Richie inspired me, made me more alive.

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What makes you more alive? What inspires you? What gives your heart a flutter and your toes a little twitch? What gets you off that track of yours and into a feeling of whimsy where you want to dust yourself off and soar? Is it a song, or a person, or a quote, or a feeling? Is it a something you pass every day or a something you missed long ago? Is it a dream that you don’t dare share or a wish you thought you would have let go of by now?

This week, my wish is that you honor that which makes you feel more alive. Even if you aren’t supposed to or you aren’t really allowed, find a way to do it anyway. Break a societal rule to honor your own (as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone), soar with your whimsy, leap with your heart, invite your ideas to color your future with a big fat brush.

Ride the wind to the place where the moon sits down for breakfast to fatten herself up and the stars plug in to get recharged. Find the place that gives flowers their voice and trees new sheet music for their songs, where your heart knows love and your eyes know sparkle, where your imagination comes alive. You see, that's where I most like to be, so of course I'd love for you to join me....want a cupcake?

photo by richard kehl via flickr