Rainbow Power – honouring Maya Angelou

 ’Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud’ — Maya Angelou

rainbows for mara A top R bott May 20140002 rainbows for mara A top R bott May 20140003

Today, as the world said goodbye to Maya Angelou, it seems fitting that my daughters were making rainbow art.  We should all be grateful for the wisdom and strength of this amazing woman who inspired peace and equality to the world.  Author, poet, teacher, civil activist…..her rainbow spirit will live on!  I recently discovered her writings and look forward to exploring them more with my daughters (she has a number of children’s books that I have yet to read).  I hope you will too.

MAYA ANGELOU

When asked how she’d like to be remembered, Angelou once told an interviewer ” What I would really like said about me is that I dared to love…By love, I mean that condition in the human spirit so profound it encourages us to develop courage and build bridges, and then to trust those bridges and cross the bridges in attempts to reach other human beings.”

May we all dare to do the same!

autumn beauty

There are not enough words to capture the beauty of this season, but this poem from Mary Oliver is a great place to start…

Song for Autumn

In the deep fall
don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

More Autumn poems (including another by Mary Oliver) can be found here at Poet Seers.

Don’t you just love this time of year?  Does it make the words swirl poetic in your mind like the golden leaves in the wind?  Does your mind long to capture the images like my camera, to hold still this beautiful time of change?

 

how to live a life

     Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

~Mary Oliver

I bring you this, just in case you have not yet discovered the powerful poetry of Mary Oliver.

…her nature and spiritual references,
her concise and moving words,
about the little things and the big stuff
speak to my very core
&
tear me wide open!

tell me. what astonishes you.  please.