living the dream

frederiksted, st.croix

goodbye ziggy

I don't know where I'm going from here but I promise it won't be boring.--david bowie

perks are best here

good questions

can you be sick for a home you've never seen?
--Jen Rose

do the shells still hear the sea though they are in pieces?
--L.L. Barkat

how long can this coffee cup last?

--Megan Willome

a new year

vendor, Frederiksted, St. Croix  2016

Happy New Year! In St Croix last week at a J'ouvert festival and huge steel drum bands played while people ate and danced, and everywhere you turned there was more to be seen. But amidst all that, this man in his sandal stall with his wistful dreaming eyes stayed with me the most. I'm back in Chicago now but I wish him and all of us a happy 2016!

exuberant is existence

"That Lives in Us" by Jalaludin Rumi

If you put your hands on this oar with me,
they will never harm another, and they will come to find
they hold everything you want.
If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer
lift anything to your 
mouth that might wound your precious land--
that sacred earth that is
your body.
If you put your soul against this oar with me,
the power that made the universe will enter your sinew
from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm
that lives in us.
Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with blessings, like my words give.
Why lay yourself on the torturer's rack of the past and future?
The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities
will find no rest.
Be kind to yourself, dear--to your innocent follies.
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.

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