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