So many of us are facing changes and challenges, holding conflicting emotions in tension as if holding our breaths. We're not fully inhabiting a settled place. 
How does it feel to live fully present to our whole and our fractured selves? To truly embrace all parts of our human complexity in love. To stop judging! To know our strength and fragility as opposite and essential parts of our same beautiful wholeness? A seamless tapestry unfolding?

the path
 
 
 
it began as quietly
as the tentative heartbeat
of the eaglet hatchling
steady and fragile
hungry, waiting to be fed,
to live or to die
immediate the question with first breath
a crack down the center
two-sided heart
 
not fully loving
not really mourning,
the outer appearance of
inner grief,
covered over with imperatives:
do something;
resignation and action
stumbling path made visible
to every fledgling,
 fraught with unknown danger
 
through the crack
sunlight pours in
revealing every tenuous
first attempt
each hint of reassurance
sustenance on every side
close-up and textured
not hidden or barely imagined
 
obstacles along the way like boulders
or as smooth as sugar sand
are real
clouds ever tied invisibly to sun
quietness and revelation
articulate amidst the noise
two-sided heart, expanding,
embracing
eternal grief-eternal love
made one
 
the winged path
whole
and sacred
 
 
 
 
© january 2017
pab
 
 
 O   O   O
 
 

         This morning dawns full with opportunity as does every morning. We leave behind the old year with all its complexities to face the unknown.  I look forward with hope, true hope that is more like faith and trust than like optimism.  In our times it seems that optimism is a poor and shabby substitute for real hope. Optimism is a kind of shallowness that wishes for what it affirms.  Hope, on the other hand, is deep and strong and resides at our core. Hope is unshakably certain that each of us who dares to love fearlessly and steadfastly has full capacity to create a stupendous, transformed future. In this I believe, with every cell of my being. This is my Happy New Year certainty.
 
       The spirit of Sophie will, no doubt, inform much of my writing in this new year. As she grew older, quieter and lived more in the spirit world than in the physical, she continued to teach me, to impart messages, and to let me know when she was ready to leave her physical existence. Though her body is no longer here with us, she remains a very real presence, an unbroken bond, a promise still very much alive.  My brief tribute to Sophie, below, was all that I could write at the time. Today I can say Happy New Year, dear Sophie!