Poppies in the attic

Ukrainain Christmas

Life's Lessons

LIFE'S LESSONS

Here is Your Assignment ...

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or not, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around....

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time, informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The “failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately "works".

4. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it, then you can go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

6. "There" is no better than “here". When your "there" has become "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will, again, look better than "here".

7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need, what you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. The answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust.

10. Whether you think you can or can't, in either case you'll be right.

~ Author Unknown ~

"bliss"

"bliss"
 nature’s kiss
silent white
a flight into fantasy...
erratic
erotic
unpredictable

calm
within
breath

stimulating
without
exertion

frozen toes
piercing cold
sweltering inside

let
burn control
put
sound on hold

silent white
whispers

though the night
calls
for answers
pronounce a pause

slide into fantasy
exotic
hypnotic
unpredictable

lukewarm
won’t do
stir the ash
ignite the ember
fuel the fire
pour something cool
sipping ever
………………ever
so slow
leave the light low

silent white
………………… bliss

~Gwynneth Green~

Our children

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,...
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”

~ Khalil Gibran

Love thoughts

When we learn to stop...and be truly alive in the present moment - we are in touch with what's going on within and around us. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

My wish for you is that you are held, witnessed and appreciated for all that you are in a way that heals all the times that you weren't. May you be totally seen..., heard, and cherished. May you be so adored, that all your hurt and longing is forever washed away in a flood of endless love, flowing over from deep within your heart. And may you find a way to truly make the best of every experience, in the spirit of continuously improving the quality of your life, and the quality of the people in it. May you choose to only go up from here. ~ Thierry Maurel

Love
Embracing Tao, you become embraced.
Supple, breathing gently, you become reborn.
Clearing your vision, you become clear.
Nurturing your beloved, you become impartial.
Opening your heart, you become accepted....
Accepting the World, you embrace Tao.
Bearing and nurturing,
Creating but not owning,
Giving without demanding,
This is Love.
~ Lao Tzu 

Circles

"May we rediscover the power of circles, of sitting in council to listen and learn; the power of trusting the wisdom that emerges from the voices that are quietest, least valued or that we least expect to learn from. May we recall the power of listening patiently for the intelligence of the whole to emerge, without rushing toward conclusions.

May we risk that first step of standing on behalf of what we most love and value— knowing that the first step is the hardest, and trus...ting that once we take it we will be met tenfold.

May we practice growing ourselves, cultivating our capacities to connect and curbing our habituated tendencies toward comparison, hierarchy and isolation. May we be willing to feel the depths of our despair so that we may dream ourselves into the possibility of soaring together. May we be informed by our wounds but not defined by them.

May we remember the power of empathy and practice seeing the world through others' eyes. In this great interdependent web may we remind ourselves that whatever befalls others happens to us.

May art remind us that it can reveal and awaken new possibilities as we look to our artists to reveal pathways forward.

May we recall, celebrate and invoke our belonging to our one and only home.

May we make this migration together, finding our ways through obstacles, habits and fears. Guided by the beauty, love and truth that surround us. May we liberate the pathways, for them and for us. May we remember to reach out for each others' hands, to ask for the guidance of those who came before us, to listen for the guidance of those who walk, swim, fly and crawl among us.

Amen, Awomen, Aho and Ashe."

by Nina Simons, of Bioneers

 

Perspective

Life would be boring if we were not challenged every now and again. Setbacks occur to be overcome. Mistakes happen so that you can learn from them. But at the moment when you have to deal with something, it is not always easy to stay positive. Even though you know that there is a lesson to be learnt, you prefer not to hear it. It’s ok to be fed up, but be careful that you are not unnecessarily hard on yourself. If you hang a...round in this misery you pull yourself down and make the situation worse. What really helps is to look at the problem from a different angle. Bring the scales back in balance. Change your perspective by paying attention to things that are going well. Then you will see that everything actually is all right. The way in which you look at reality affects how your life goes. What you experience is a fact; how you experience it is your choice. The frequency of Perspective helps you to re-direct set backs by looking at things differently.

~ Janosh Art

Happy New Year

“Respond to every call that excites your spirit.”

~ Rumi ~