"I love you. It will end. Leave something of sweetness And substance In the mouth of the world." (Anne Belle Kaufman)

Boy in a Field

"Sometimes hope is a radical act, sometimes a quietly merciful response, sometimes a second wind, or just an increased awareness of goodness and beauty. Maybe you didn't get what you prayed for, but what you got instead was waking to the momentousness of life, the power of loving hearts. You hope to wake up in time to see the dawn, the first light, a Technicolor sunrise, but the early morning instead is cloudy with mist. Still, as you linger, the ridge stands majestically black against a milky sky. And if you pay attention, you'll see the setting of the moon that illuminated us all as we slept. And you see a new day dawn." (Anne Lamott)

Mood of the Day.

The Boy and his makeshift slide.

"The light drains me of what I might be..." (Lisel Mueller)

The small things which stand for all things. 'Mamma, what do clouds taste like?' asked my son today. Ah, the magic of children.

"Going nowhere...isn's about turning your back on the world; it's about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply." (Pico Iyer)

"Mysteries, yes. Truly we live with mysteries too marvellous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising. How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken. How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem. Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say 'Look' and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads." (Mary Oliver)

"All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers is contained in the dog." (Franz Kafka)

"Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads too everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present." (Lisel Mueller)

Lanky, growing, legs.

The fullest people-you know, the ones who are really whole and alive- are those unafraid and unashamed of the soul.

"Sometimes you have to let life turn you upside down, so you can learn how to live, right side up." (Swati)

...sometimes this is what last minute revision for a test looks like in our home...

We sat and listened to the rain, some happier than others.

"Let me ask you this. Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason? And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure- your life- what would do for you? And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know? Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world." (Mary Oliver)

The moment

"How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off it's special mystery in order to break into blossom: as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious." (Lisel Mueller)

"We could wake up to what we were -when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all nothing- before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness." (Marie Howe)

"One of the hardest things to make a child understand is, that down underneath your feet, if you go far enough, you come to blue sky and stars again; that there really is no 'down' for the world, but only in every direction an 'up'." (Anne Gilchrist)

The Dog and the writing on the wall.

We still love bubble baths

"Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm. Im stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else." (Diane Ackerman)