Bright spots.

Out of nowhere yesterday, I received an e-mail from a dear friend with whom I am woefully out of touch most of the time. Don't worry, she wrote; this isn't a chain letter, and you don't need to do anything. The e-mail was addressed to the lovely, amazing women in her life, and she was writing to pass on a collection of thoughts she had just come across in her own e-mail. Because it was exactly what I needed to read when it came in--and because it got the two of us onto the phone to talk for the first time in years--I'm passing it on here.

May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Stretch.

Normally I would balk at posting a photograph involving this much motion blur--but this afternoon view from my living room window (taken with no zoom, no less) was too good not to share.  She didn't give me a chance for a second shot; the next picture in my set is her walking away with no small amount of indignation.

Full to bursting.

The peonies are fat and taut now, all along the northern wall of one side of my complex.  They stretch and stretch toward the direct sun that hits the sidewalk a good foot from where they are; they leg out all over that sidewalk and yet don't seem to make it all the way into the light.  Clusters of black ants pad all over their seams and creases.

Yesterday, walking to the post office with a new friend after my writing group, I saw a funeral procession: one of the village's fire trucks, bearing a steel-grey coffin, being followed on foot by a loose cluster of men, women, and children. 

Tonight, all grades are in, all desktop files sorted and placed where they should be on my hard drive.  The weather warms but doesn't yet reach heat; farmers plant beans across the road from their corn.  I continue hunting out the various accoutrements of my life in England--the phone, the top-up card, the maps, the ways of being--so that they can make the trip with me when I go back at the end of the week; it's a short trip, a business trip, and initially it felt as though it would be coming a bit too close to the end of the semester for comfort.  And yet it turns out that it's exactly the right time: time to spend a little while in a city I love, time to let my mind stretch toward that different kind of light, that different kind of companionship and solitude.

Greened.

Tonight, as has been the case for most of the day, I sit in my green chair, within view of the green trees, and I grade and grade and grade.  And the work is good.  Some of the work is even excellent.  And so it is in no way a frustration to have the work to do, only a longer stretch in one sitting than I usually spend, particularly in these attention-diffused days. 

And that's when I see the difference the leaves are making when the sun sets.  Somehow, over the course of this last month, as I've moved from meeting to meeting to class to interview to meeting to interview to dinner, I've missed the precise moment when the budding branches became the leafed woods.  Now my apartment is shaded and green, cooled all day long by breeze-ripple.  Now the sunset lasts three hours, glittering all along its going.