Scintilla

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soul nate


jury duty is a wild concept. whenever the government wants, they can just be like “call off work bestie, we need you to solve a murder 🥰 here’s fifteen dollars.”

If you are a lover of words and ideas and haven't experienced Maria Popova's Brain Pickings - treat yourself and visit her site. Through her curation of the artistic expressions of others and via her own finely crafted words, she creates a place of respite and renewal for all. From her latest 'Midweek pick-me-up':

An exquisite letter of advice she (Anais Nin) sent to a seventeen-year-old aspiring author by the name of Leonard W., whom she had taken under her wing as creative mentor. Nin writes:

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

[…]

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4

Thanks to the Payson family's bounteous gift, we had some amazing Butternut Squash Soup on Sunday!

Rubbed the squash with olive oil, sprinkled with smoked garlic salt/pepper and roasted in the oven at 450 for about 45 minutes. While the squash was roasting, I sauteed some shallots and leftover kielbasa. Scooped and blended the roasted Butternut with chicken stock and half and half. Threw everything together 'a la peanut butter sandwiches' and YUM YUM YUM YUM!!! Served with Ezekiel Bread Garlic Parmesan Toast and Cucumber/Tomato/Marinated Pearl Onion side salad.

(the Peaches were scrumtabulous too!!)

Love you guys!

This feeling
~
This feeling makes me want to run.
Take a drink.
Sleep.
Anything but feel.
Not so different from other panics, but distinct in its flavor of pain.
I don’t want to trace it to its roots.
To last night’s dream of sending you to travel a long winding sidewalk on your own.
Realizing, with horror
that I’d let you go alone.
~
Tonight
You said that you want to sleep with us forever.
I know it’s wrong but, for tonight, come on.
Even though it means violent cover wars.
(how can you be my daughter, you who throws off the blankets with wild abandon?)
Even though it means this bed of marriage is literally divided.
(to be fair, I’m not ready to let go either)
Even though you slowly encroach upon my space and I slowly lose my mind.
(the panic faintly subsides when, skin to skin, I can feel you sleep and breathe)
~
Yesterday
I stared blankly at the other mothers who told me that they will cry when you (the archetype young you) goes to school.
‘We’re excited’, I said.
Until we dreamed in tandem, this night, each of leaving the other.
~
Before
We lost your brother.
I had a vision that the dock I was standing on collapsed.
I fell deep and yet not deep into translucent olive gold green water.
The hand of God reached in and pulled me out.
~
Right Now
I feel that lake inside of me.
God is reaching down in a loop.
I am simultaneously inside and outside of the water.
Falling and rescued.
Unaware of what is to come.
Convalescing in my grief after it has happened.
The golden light in the olive green water is you.
The archetypal and real hope of you.
God pulls me out of the water.
I pray, with all my might, that you will follow.

Prayer for Today – Acceptance – 8/8/2018

All-Encompassing Mother and Father – I Thank you for this day. I am blessed to wake up in a safe and comfortable home with a family that I treasure. (Even if the laundry piles on the floor are growing like a mutating alien abomination) So, then, I must thank you for the mess in my life, both internal and external. May I sit with the energy of unkempt chaos that lives inside of me and learn what it wants from me. May I love and accept the imperfect parts of myself, inviting them to teach me about surrender.

Thank you for loving me as your daughter – a love so large that when I let it in, resurrects me from the pain of my own exile. Forgive me for my stubborn self-pity and pain. Help me to understand that it is safe to open my heart, to see the truth, to be the unique flawed gem of consciousness that I am.

Divine All, help me lean into the chasm of my fear and to find my strength and freedom in free fall. Help me to hear you. Help me to respond.

Amen.

(photo by Michael Divine)