Delicate branches
like fingers reaching to sun
touch my heart instead

~ Nancy Yeilding *

[Image: Oak tree, Santa Margarita, California.]

This month’s featured image ~ SANTA MARGARITA OAK ~ is available as a 8″ x 10″ photographic print for $20. Professionally processed with a luminous, iridescent finish. Free shipping.

Click here for enlarged view

Kindly place your order through Paypal or mail your check/money order to:

Greetings With Heart
245M Mt. Hermon Road, #307
Scotts Valley CA 95066

Please contact Viktoria if you have any questions.

* Nancy Yielding currently works as an editor and a business and personal coach. Her teaching activities are expanding via the Internet, which provides a contemporary medium of sharing ageless wisdom with students anywhere in the world through e-study groups, as well as through workshops in various gurukula centers, East and West.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to read Platanus Orientalis.

Valley of the Moon:

red grapevines shiny with rain

umbrellas for the birds.

~ Jane Benson

About Jane Benson:

“Poetry has been part of my life since childhood when my mother read aloud her favorite Robert Frost poems and I wore out our copy of Robert Louis Stevensonʼs, A Childʼs Garden of Verses.

“More a reader than writer of verse, I like to collect poems and share them with others, sometimes learning them by heart. Occasionally, I write haiku for myself to capture a feeling, image or experience –a moment in time that I want to remember.

“Recently, I began a group for poetry lovers at Deborahʼs Palm, a new nonprofit community center for women in Palo Alto, CA.”

Image ~ right ~ Autumn Grapes, courtesy of Mark, Flickr.
Thumbnail image ~ Sonoma vineyards, California.

Editor’s Note: Sonoma is the Chocuyen Indian name for “Valley of the Moon.”

You must give birth
to your images.

They are the future
waiting to be born.

Fear not
the strangeness you feel.

The future must enter you
long before it happens.

Just wait for the birth,
for the hour of new clarity.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Our greatest inspirations come naturally, quietly, suddenly when our mind and soul are at ease and when our observing eye is alert to nuance and detail.

Riding on the wings of these imaginings are thoughts, searching for form, struggling to be born in language. The language of art.

With patience and love, the artist creates.

Joyful the day when creation is true to its source.

Images for this post are from Basilica di San Francesco, Assisi, Italy.

O Spirit of the Summertime!
Bring back the roses to the dells;
The swallow from her distant clime,
The honey-bee from drowsy cells.

Bring back the friendship of the sun;
The gilded evenings, calm and late,
When merry children homeward run,
And peeping stars bid lovers wait.

Bring back the singing; and the scent
Of meadowlands at dewy prime;—
Oh, bring again my heart’s content,
Thou Spirit of the Summertime!

~  William Allingham (1828-1889), Irish poet and man of letters.

This month’s featured image ~ SPIRIT OF SUMMERTIME ~ is available as a 8″ x 10″ photographic print for $20. Professionally processed with a luminous, iridescent finish. Free shipping.

Click here for enlarged view

 Kindly place your order through Paypal or mail your check/money order to:

 Greetings With Heart
245M Mt. Hermon Road, #307
Scotts Valley CA 95066

 Please contact Viktoria if you have any questions.

To fly
you must be free

To be free
you must let go

To let go
you must find trust

To find trust
you must have faith

To have faith
you must keep hope

To keep hope
you must see beauty

To see beauty
you must know love

To know love
you must learn to fly

The lesson is this:
If you love to fly
you must fly to love.

Wayne Visser submitted this poem as part of the “Reflections on Love/Poems on Peace,” 2010 Valentine Peace Project. Wayne is Senior Associate at the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and Visiting Professor of Sustainability at Magna Carta College, Oxford.

This week’s image ~ above right ~ Pelicans Aloft, Santa Cruz, California.

If you enjoyed this poem, you might also like to read One Flower At A Time and Painted Blossoms.

yellow lupine lean
petals cupped to hear
the ocean softly singing

About Jane Benson:

“Poetry has been part of my life since childhood when my mother read aloud her favorite Robert Frost poems and I wore out our copy of Robert Louis Stevensonʼs, A Childʼs Garden of Verses.

“More a reader than writer of verse, I like to collect poems and share them with others, sometimes learning them by heart. Occasionally, I write haiku for myself to capture a feeling, image or experience –a moment in time that I want to remember.

“Recently, I began a group for poetry lovers at Deborahʼs Palm, a new nonprofit community center for women in Palo Alto, CA.”

This week’s image ~ above right ~ Jane Benson, Pescadero Beach.
Thumbnail image ~ Yellow Lupine.

The temple bell stops
but I still hear the sound
coming out of the flowers.

~ Basho

This week’s image ~ Japanese Temple Bell, Creative Commons, Saul Adereth/Flickr.

Deep within an indigo sky,
On a cold dark winter’s night,
A river of stars makes a pathway above
All frost and golden bright.

Between one place and another,
Long ago and far away,
We sent a message
To reach us when the time was right,
on the darkest of nights……
It came to us;
The Sign we’ve been waiting for.

Deep within an indigo sky
On the Winter Solstice eve,
A magical event;
A full Moon eclipse,
Hidden by a rainy mist,
Announcing the arrival
Of the Avatar of the Great Divide.

Between what we know as time
And something other,
We are shown a mystic key……
It came to us;
How to walk in the Middle Way.
How to meet in the center of extremes.

From deep within this season
Of Light;
Kindness, service and good works,
on the longest night of the year,
We sense a change within ourselves
Reflecting the  Gift of Enlightenment;

Merry is the person who can find
In every way, to Love,
To believe in goodness,
To see magic all around……
To dance in the evolutionary stream.

Between one place and another,
A Star comes down from the sky;
The Avatar of the Great Divide,
Who can gather us all into One
And who has begun to turn the Key,
Unlocking a new Circle of Time.

Read more of Renee’s poems on her website.

This week’s image ~ above right ~ Carina Nebula (“Mystic Mountain”), NASA, Public Domain.
Thumbnail image ~ Boomerang Nebula, NASA, Public Domain.

All
The craziness,
All the empty plots,
all the ghosts and fears,

All the grudges and sorrows have
Now
Passed.

I must have inhaled
A strange
Feather

That finally

Fell

Out.

~ Hafiz

Translation by Daniel Ladinsky.

This week’s image ~ Creative Commons, Swan Feather, Jim Champion.
Thumbnail image ~ Creative Commons, Feather Fan, Phoenix Wolf Ray.

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes.

How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.

I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.

And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

~ Pat Schneider

Reprinted by permission.

Image ~ above right ~ Creative Commons, echiner1/Flickr.
Thumbnail image ~ Creative Commons, Ana Cotta/Flickr.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to read Feline Felicity and Canine Charisma.