“The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been….Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be.”
Madeleine L’Engle 1918 — 2007
From my earliest earliest years I remember my mother telling me, “If you see a piece of trash, don’t step over it. Pick it up and throw it away.” No matter where I am: in my neighborhood, out and about, on the hiking trails, if I see it I pick it up. I draw the line at Band-Aids® and tissues, but other than that I pretty much live my mother’s motto.
When I came across this bottle top I put it in my pocket but not before flipping it over. Imagine! A beer company with a spirtual message. A friend in recovery once told me that alcohol is called spirits because we turn to substances when our spirits are empty, hurting or otherwise checked out and in need of fortification.
But back to our beer bottle wisdom. What you’re made of matters. What am I made of? I can roll the good stuff off pretty easily: sweet, creative, loving, playful. It’s the other stuff that I’m made of that’s tougher to swallow: petty, not so great sometimes on follow through, impatient, impetuous. We can all come up with an alphabet of our strengths and strengths waiting in the wings for us to grow into them. I’m holding on to the bottle cap. I did a good deed and was rewarded with thought-food to consider.
A sanctified relationship is one in which neither party silences nor sacrifices, and each is responsible for expressing
his or her strength and vulnerability. Real closeness, I now know, cannot be pursued or demanded. Love is the passion
of people clarifying their beliefs and values through each other. Phoebe Eng. b. 1971
Jun Kanekoi’s sculpture, Desert Botanical Gardens, Phoenix, AZ
photo courtesy of Martin Darivck
The genius for happiness is still so rare, is indeed on the whole the rarest genius. To possess it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar, to treat it with the proud generosity of a prince; to bring to its totality the deep understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment and ingenuousness of a child.
Ellen Key, 1849 – 1926
I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
Dawna Markova, b.1942
“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 – 1968)
Photo: Flip Schulke/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images