The title is  a quote by Noelle Oxenhandler, in The Wishing Year.  And it seems appropriate for publishing on a Sunday.

I wrote that in my journal on 1/2/14, perhaps cementing an orgy of reading for the full year on-line, via Kindle and using that amazing thing called the library.  And now that I have let playing Bejeweled and Zuma Blitz go, I’m reading even more.

How do you read?  I’m an underliner, thus, though I love my Kindle, after I highlight I try to go back and copy the highlighted areas into a journal so I won’t lose them.  I’m sure there’s a way to pull up all the highlights in all the books, but I haven’t sought it out yet (good task for today).  Meanwhile, I do have a journal filling up with delicious quotes.

Today I’m going to share.

At year’s beginning I started on a journey that is on-going:  try to sort out all of this law of attraction stuff into something that makes real sense.  I tend to trust my own experience more than gurus’ latest whatever, and 6 years of practicing the art of attraction tells me, experientially, that call and it will come is not exactly how it works.  So how does it work?  That’s the journey.  You’ll see the connection, some of it serendipity as I read, in what follows.

my journal note 1/2/14:  As much as I’d like to follow in their footsteps, I don’t trust the markers they’ve laid down for me.  In the dark of the night when I really need these markers, it will turn out that they weren’t white stones but only bread crumbs, already eaten by the birds.

From Wishing Well:  Making Your Every Wish Come True, Paul a’ikina Pearsall

The best way to understand how a wish works is to think of it as a tiny spurt of energy.  Like everything in the Universe, our thoughts or intentions are also forms of energy.  When we focus our intentions by making a wish, we are creating a tiny energetic shove within the system of which we are an inseparable  part.  Because of the power of intentions to be nonlocal, to transcend time and space, they ever so slightly move the cosmos.  This is why one simple wish can help swing things a little more our way. [emphasis mine]

my note says:  so we can send our wishes out looking for acceptance-ready niches in our environment – nonlocal and timeless.

The art of wishing is inextricably bound to the art of magic.  And magic takes us as far back as our species…Our ancestors couldn’t afford to be shy about informating the gods and spirits of their earthly desires…the art of wishing arises in the place where human power and powerlessness meet (Noelle Oxenhandler: The Wishing Year:  A House, a Man, My Soul)

Neil Gaiman’s New Year’s wish (good for revisiting in the middle of the year):

May your coming year be filled
with magic and dreams
and good madness.
I hope you read some fine books
and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful,
and don’t forget to make some art –
write or draw or build or sing or live
as only you can.
And I hope, somewhere in the next year,
you surprise yourself.

If every year goes like this year, I am going to make it a habit of reading that on New Year’s Eve for the rest of my life!  I also reread Gaiman’s American Gods, an awesome love story hiding in a story about what happens to the gods when people no longer believe in them, and a perennial favorite.  On my Kindle now.

Finn Butler came into my life through FaceBook.  On her blog she says this about her poem that went viral:

Even though I’m not particularly fond of that poem myself, it still thrills me to hear that my work has helped someone with their mental health or their general wellbeing. Keep working at it! In the past I often felt that my daily actions couldn’t have an impact on the looming darkness of mental illness… then one day I just woke up and realised how far I had come already. Whatever it is you’re fighting, you’re going to get there. I’m so proud of you. 

I think none of us knows the ripples we send out with our words.  I’ve often found that posts I liked the least received the strongest, most persona, feedback from at least one person who was evidently waiting to read what I chucked off as good enough.  Which is why I’m writing blogs again.  My way of sending grace out into the Universe for whomever needs it at the moment.

Anyways, you will also want to read her poem:

Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water,
and everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes
you cannot even breathe deeply, and
the night sky is no home, and
you have cried yourself to sleep enough times
that you are down to your last two percent, but

Nothing is infinite,
not even loss.

You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day
you are going to find yourself again.

And here’s an excerpt from a blog, responding to my own blog hop, by Jacqualine Marie Nunes Baxman, who doesn’t write nearly as much as I’d like to read her!

My process is probably nothing more than paying attention.  I am a master observer, a voyeur of sorts, and I know how this tendency was born.  At the age of 9 or so, I was quarantined in my bedroom for 30 days.  Scarlet Fever. Raging hallucinations.  (In those days the treatment was daily injections of penicillin, a darkened room and “sponge” baths in a diluted solution of CN Plus Germicidal (no longer manufactured). Think Lysol mixed with Pine Sol.  My room was blue with a rocking chair that had a striped fabric seat.  My youngest brother was just a baby at the time and the summer was long and scattered with tanned construction workers rebuilding a sidewalk in our part of the neighborhood, each of them sweating and shouting as they laid down the new cement. One of them had blonde hair, blue eyes, perfectly straight white teeth and wore a white handkerchief around his neck to catch the beads of sweat.  He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

Horned dogs and colicky babies
All screaming at the same time
Lavender crickets kissing my feet
And the sun bleeding diamonds
Into a sieve made of grey glass
The Chigger Man knows my name
The flames of Hell are blue
With stripes that creak when the wind blows
Remind me tomorrow why you’ve come

How could I not pay attention?  All I had to do was breathe and everything showed up.  It still shows up.   Once I stopped judging it, stopped expecting it to be what it did not want to be, it came faster, arriving when I needed it to and always with fresh news.  Writing is the big VOICE dancing.  Read Shakespeare.  He must have danced with the gods.  But my process really just involves knowing who I am, paying attention and leaving the light on for the muse. You will see.  There are surprises coming.

Finally, thanks to Pixel of Ink which sends me daily freebie lists for my Kindle,  I’ve also found a few good books in the library from their suggested books that would have cost me $$ on Kindle.  All in all, a very good deal fro discovering new writers

I’ll start (and end for today) with the library books:

Breakfast with Buddha, (this is a novel but is, in the end, also a teaching text) 

[Sickness is] all from the spirit.  Except sometimes people take for themselves a bad sickness so another soul will not have to, or so people will find for it a cure.  These things can be very complicated, taking some else’s karma…..[and on getting clear]  Live a good life.  Help people.  Meditate.  Live another good life.  Meditate some more.  Don’t hurt.  Don’t hurt.  Don’t hurt.

It seems to me that life often works that way:  You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fasion, and the answer appears…But…that answer arrives according to its own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise.  And it comes in a way you’re not prepared for, or don’t want, or can’t, at first, accept.

That last reminded me of one of my Wise Women Quotes:  Sunsets happen even when we don’t notice.  Grace falls down on us and we brush it off, annoyed that our clothes have all this sparkling stuff on them, when we have all these important things to take care of.

And for fun, To Say Nothing of the Dog,  which is slapstick comedy well-written, and considered sci-fi because it concerns time travel, but don’t let that stop you because it is more historical than sci-fi which is taken matter of factly, and it had me laughing out loud. 

I’d love to hear what you’re reading these days!  There’s no such thing as too many books waiting in line to be read.

P.S.  I had to come back and add something else:  How and Why to Keep A Commonplace Book because it seems as if that is what I’ve done all my life and didn’t even know it!  The things you learn.