A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes (as sung by Cinderella)

I seem to still be on a New Year tangent, full of hope and pro-activity and forward motion - think I'll ride the wave of optimism before the roots of reality take hold... :-)

SONG: A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes as sung by Cinderella

BOOK: This Year I Will...: How to Finally Change a Habit, Keep a Resolution or Make a Dream Come True by M. J. Ryan

POEM: New Year Prayer by David Whyte

This robust heart involved

with too many worlds

for its own good,

this portion of creation

constantly trying

to make its self singular,

this chef at home in the kitchen

among the gleam of knives,

sommelier

among eclectic bottles,

sometimes dreaming

as a hermit among leaves,

drinking the centuries

of inherited silence,

sometimes the

social host opening

the doors and lighting

the candles,

often a father lifting his daughter

high up above him

and then

the husband

sheltered by night

attempting

to talk and talk again,

too often now

as the years go by

the son worrying

for a father sitting

Atlantic miles away,

in a silent

remembered parallel.

And now this

other parallel,

this symmetry

inside

for everything

on the outside,

the writer in winter

at his desk,

caught in the light,

beneath the window,

bringing together

the last and the first,

the middle and the edge,

the near and the far,

the troubled lives

all calling for the one line

and the one life,

for creation came together

in a central

unspoken wish,

to be held

and made one

like a god's blessing

out of nowhere,

the pen

somehow

touching a wound

that heals them all.

QUOTE: "Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions." ~ Edgar Cayce

The Blessings (Dar Williams)

SONG: The Blessings by Dar Williams

BOOK: Blessings: Prayers and Declarations for a Heartful Life by Julia Cameron

POEM: The Art of Blessing the Day by Marge Piercy

This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin, wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your splashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

This is the blessing for sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.

This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends'
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.

QUOTE: "May we be a channel of blessings for all that we meet." ~ Edgar Cayce