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Cast Net - December 2021
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Having a connection to the big world beyond the Bay has always reassured and stimulated me. Travel is not possible right now. I find extraordinary things, heartwarming things, soul-nourishing things on the World Wide Web. Being able to share them makes me feel a little bit better about the time spent (or wasted?) “casting my net."
The Moving Stars
My suggestion would be to turn off the sound completely and just hum.
Breathing Lessons
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This book is literally changing lives. Maybe yours?
Rick Bragg Interview in Garden & Gun
Waynetopia
Now see his WALLPAPER! Based on those early landscape panels you used to see in grandmotherly dining rooms, but with surprises.
Blue Blood
Everything about them feels like a contradiction, down to their blue blood, and our dependence on it. Find out why, here:
Taylor & Yo-Yo Ma Duet: Nobody Knows
All That Has Never Yet Been Spoken
​I have great faith in all things not yet spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one yet has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, may I be forgiven,
but what I need to say is this:
may what I do flow from me like a river,
without anger, without timidness,
no forcing and no holding back.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing You as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
Ranier Maria Rilke
Kanazawa Kenichi Art
Nadia Bolz-Weber on forgiving yourself
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Also check out her podcast, The Confessional, where she talks to people about what action in their past they have had the hardest time forgiving in themselves. She creates a prayer specific to that person and circumstance and reads it to them. She follows up a week later to check in.
What do you have a hard time forgiving yourself for?
When I am Among the Trees - Mary Oliver
After reading one of her poems, I always feel more attuned/in touch/reverent, no matter what she has brought to my attention. Oliver has been called “America’s most read poet." I would add “most loved."
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.
- Mary Oliver
Thursday Appointment
Dancing in the Aisles
I smiled and paused a moment in my shopping, listening.
It wasn’t enough. I had to dance in grateful thanks for all that song has meant to me over the years – for the people I loved, no longer with us, who loved that song; for the daughter, daughter in law, and granddaughter who I adore, and whose images dance before me, “lovely, made from love."
In celebration, masked and newly reminded of the continued and increasing vulnerability we all share, I danced.
It was the least I could do.
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It was all I could do.
Late Fragment
Paired it with a photo
Giving Raymond Carver credit here.
​And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment.” from A New Path to the Waterfall​, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.