Blog

I drove to the lakeshore today and it was hugely pretty and scenic. It was freezing today. Icy rain. I froze without gloves. Spring is funny here in Canada. But truly beautiful at the same time.

Sometimes I hear birds chirping over the snow. It can stop me in my tracks to hear such heaven. Their song of peace breaking up the cold often astounds me. Their sounds of awe and a calming joy can magnify the arresting subtleties of beauty around.

Peace and health and love is Everyman’s prayer. Yet prayers, wishes and hopes need our help, too. If we want peace, we must be examples of that peace and foster it for ourselves. Without it, we are less apt to manufacture proper pathways of love.

The science is in. Even if your life has been especially tough, you can be on an even playing field with others who haven’t had as many troubles when you forgive and learn to keep an open heart.

Trees can teach us so much at this beautiful time—in their giving colour, in their giving letting go. Trees graduate us to so many deeper things. I have been thinking of the trees and things lots.

Any reparations course of love and forgiveness includes asking oneself: How can I have done things better today? How did I use my words today? How did I direct my heart? Where was I kind? Where was I not? And where I felt I was kind, where could I have even been kinder and done better? Let us affirm that forgiveness is a process. ...

On the heels of a Thanksgiving, at least in Canada, and due soon for my neighbours in the north, it is a season to give gratitude to what we are fortunate to have. In doing so, we can better extend the limits of our concern to others. ... It would follow then from that, also, that forgiveness for the things we have not mindfully done and giving our forgiveness to things beyond our control is part of harvesting a gratitude package, too.

With gratitude, life becomes more whimsical, less personal, calmer, more richly detailed, and more richly connected as an energy to experience for yourself and to extend to other hearts. In this way, gratitude is a lot more than thankfulness. Gratitude is an awareness of connection and appreciation to something larger than just yourself. ...

To orient ourselves well, the most of us do not breathe well or deeply into the day and as we go about things. ... To center our minds, we have to center our hearts.

BIRD ON A SUNFLOWER: Love is quietly unfolding / in the garden / across the last three days...