Walking the Beach at Sunrise, Each Day, Six Years

                                                           the morning sky speaks

                                                            in blue-pink, soft gold and grey

                                                            stories softly shared

                                                         This January 30 marks six years of walking the beach at sunrise just about every day - in summer and winter, on 60 degree mornings and six degree  mornings, in 32 inches of snow and in soft dusted sand, taking a few pictures - except when we were somewhere away. If we were, I'd try to find water and walk there. I called the project "Each Day New Grace" and I came to find out it was so. Each day, on even the grayest, something beautiful would unfold. I started to look at nature much more closely and gained so many insights from the natural world. So often, after a churning, stormy day at the beach, or a string of them, there'd be the most still water under the prettiest sky. This year, I hope to also  jot down a haiku about a small moment observed each day at sunrise. The walks, the world outside: a daily gift.  

    How cool is happy? 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/happy-chewbacca-video.html?_r=0

Connected

Lately I've stumbled upon all kinds of sweet things people are leaving for others. First, these painted rocks left on a beach,  encouraging folks to take one, then return with a painted rock to pass on to someone else, a collaborative kindness project of a Girl Scout troop and artists from a local art gallery. In Hartford, we walked past a church with beautifully colorful handcrafted scarves hanging on the fence out front. Each had a little tag that encouraged anyone who was cold or who knew someone who was cold to take one. And yesterday I passed two tiny "free libraries" full of books and a welcoming sign urging passersby to take something to read. It made the world seem that much warmer. 

A New Year

I've always been a New Years resolution writer.  I loved how you could wake up on a January morning and there it was - this empty canvas. 

I wrote my lists year in year out until some years ago when a kind of bah humbug feeling took hold, and for a couple of years, I didn't write them. But the start to the year felt a little uncelebrated, rudderless and flat. So I started again last year with just two words "worry less." 

This year the list is long and varied and instead of resolutions, I called it 'Hopes for 2016.' I liked the looser feeling it evoked. Possibilities with a perhaps tossed in.

A few of them:

Just be more

Be in the sun rising

Be as the story unfolds and gets written

Be as the hard time becomes another day and a new chance

Be grateful and hopeful and loving and glad.

Almost September

-

I love September, that summer-fall bridge, that month awash in promise and the new, tinged with just a bit of wistfulness. The light still lasts on past supper time, the air is gentle and cut-grass fragrant and the bikes and skateboards seem to wait patiently for their after-school rides. 

Day breaks

Happy National Poetry Month. 

I can't help but love a month 

with 50 degree days and poetry in it. 

Poems:  these artful, tiny treasures, words on a page,

gathered, collected and arranged in a way that can make us 

smile, think, pause, feel, remember, cry and wonder.

Lines that stay a while, like these from Gwendolyn Brooks' poem 

"Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward" 

"...Live not for the battles won

Live not for the end-of-the-song

Live in the along."

http://www.poets.org/

https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/poetry_in_motion/atlas/chicago/spe_to_the_you_spe_to_the_pro_amo_the_nor_and_hen_iii/

http://www.favoritepoem.org/

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem-day

As pretty as winter has been, hankering for spring. 

Ramblin'

I love a ramble, a couple of hours, the road, the sky and the unfolding:
old barns, snow-covered meadows, a winding stream 
and a shaggy fella who ambles up to a fence, wonders what's what, and 
lingers for a long hello. 
And the horizon stretches wide and blue. 

My neighbor steps out her front door on this very chilly morning as I’m putting stuff in the trunk of car. “I’m goin’ someplace,” she says, matter-of-factly. She’s bundled up in a pink boots, pink striped pants, a hat, coat and mittens. She’s twirling around on her front porch.

These are all the facts I get. She’s five.

 “That sounds fun!” I tell her.

“I like going someplace,” she says and then she’s chasing her big brother around the yard a couple times and back to twirling on the porch. It’s 15 degrees out.

A few details emerge. They're going far, she says, maybe New York, maybe a party. Whenever this someplace is, there’ll be cake.

I think back to five, when I was, when our kids were, and how cozy it was to pile into the car, parents, kids, cousins, headed who knew where together. 
Sometimes someplace is just enough.

Left behind on the beach, a smile to cheer us.

Sudden Snowfall

It swirled, twirled and dusted the landscape - 

and by night the sweet snowfall had disappeared.

At the Greenmarket

http://nycitywoman.com/features/women-farmers-new-york-city%E2%80%99s-greenmarket

Walking through a carpet of sunshiny leaves, happy.

And So They Flew