Shooting Stars

Before dawn I saw a shooting star… on its tail I rode back and back to when I was 9 years old… in my cozy Coleman sleeping bag gazing deep up into the dark morning sky… quiet all around except the soft snore of my best friend George, my always buddy, quick to wag his tale or offer an understanding look straight to my nine year old heart… my arm around his warm neck as a slight rustling sound emerged from my family’s heavy green Coleman canvas tent a little distance away from my spot. It was always so satisfying picking my own spot, laying out my sleeping space just so I could see the stars as I fell to sleep and, if I was lucky, woke up early to them still, like this morning, with waking awareness of the slight damp of dew, the water sounds of the trout brook next to us, the particular fragrance of Rocky Mountain spruce and pine and aspen. I always feel closer to God, and to who I am, gazing at a night sky with the tops of trees framing my point of view….

Sir Paul

Thank you, Sir Paul! I wrote a ‘poem’ yesterday with you named …. don’t know how you can possibly read all your mail, yet I still send it….

Sir Paul

Sir Paul have you a song? Have you a song left in your heart, in your mind? A song of today for your fans of yesteryear? Of the free and hopeful flower children and the world wide hostel hoppers?

Sir Paul, James and Judy and John and Eric and George and and Diana and and Helen and Barbra and John and Neil and Paul and Mary and Peter and Jimmie and Janis and Peter and Simon and Garfunkel have you a song left in your hearts and minds for your runaway commune dreamers, your drop out wanderers, your bra tossing ceiling busting libbers, your psychedelic explorers, your out of the closet, your conscientious objectors, black power fists and your peaceful lovers and your angry fans of your highest glory days? Have you a song for us? For our now times?

Please, have you a song?

You who heralded our possibilities and our righteousness, gave melody to our grief, inspired courage in the middle of war and assasinations – singing, dancing! Have you a song for us now?

We thought surely our wisdom unstoppable, that wisdom now burnished and hammered and scarred and polished and crumpled up against the remnants of the walls, still and always pressuring forward. Wrinkled by the molding of decades, yet yoga refreshed, pressing, pressing, pressing on… whole sections of the wall still standing and dividing, dividing, dividing….

Your song for us is needed, now…

Perhaps it is our great and our grandchildren’s songs that matter, now? Their own unstoppable rainbow pressing colorful out of the clouds and bursting into the sun times, now? For they have grown tall and strong on sports and smart with study and research at their keyboard fingertips, worldwide savvy, innumerable icons and communications across cultures and organic fresh and balanced and uniquely personal in your face tattoos and piercings and universal languages…

Perhaps the remnants of the walls now stand as historic markers of the time before there was always a way around everything, a choice of simply living in a world so accessibly diverse and full of options that seeking and recognizing and working within your own best space for social justice or for your own personal peace is the sane and most effective thing you can do. And the protests continue, newer fresher generations across the globe still fighting for women’s rights, black lives matter, religious freedom and the content of character!

Tell me, beloved bards of the nineteen 60’s and 70’s, and the decades since, have you a song for the grandparents we are today? As we enjoy a rest on our gliding rockers and recliners, giving up on trying to keep up with the newest electronic devices and electronic customer service answering options and marketing algorithms and social media?

Living it up with our fresh spring water, antioxidants and home garden fruits and veggies and habitat responsible seasonal shellfish and chair aerobics and pandemic masks and hand sanitizer? Have you a song for great lonely gaps of time at home without the bright voices of our children’s families?

Have you a song? Please, is there a song?

Really??

Go easy on yourself, girl! Try to train yourself that any and every time you feel shut down, put down, or just down, to replace negative self images with the vision that you know you have of the grace-filled person inside and outside that you are now and are becoming. One little slip compared to all the times you chose health/positive?? Really?? Think how far you’ve come and build on that, not on the occasional goof. ‼️💕

Science

Science. It can be proven or disproven. It sparks possibilities and visions as well as explanations and likelihoods. But one thing science does not do is take sides. People make divisive politics out of scientific reports by making and promoting statements of denial, exaggeration, unproven theory – it’s people who turn science into politics. And that’s when trouble begins. Science is science, how you deal with it can determine the quality and longevity of life itself. End of rant.

SJJ

January 1, 2017

Snow 

   ever-so-lightly falling… 

Whitest wisps,

         heavenly petals adrift on the air

come to rest on dark fir branches and

       ice the scarlet holly berries ~

Turning my view into a

                delicate gallery 

Breath caught. 

My heart slows to match the airy fall of the intricate flakes

 ~ My soul

                        awakens

from a daily deadening of hurry and details..

                 awakens 

                                     to

                         stillness,    to

         Listening. 

SJJ