It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

      “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute…Give your approval to all you cannot understand…Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years…Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts….Practice resurrection.”
― Wendell Berry

Christmas Tree 2014

“What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.”
― Mother Teresa

Love.

“There is a twilight zone in our hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves-our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and our drives-large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness. This is a very good thing. We will always remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That’s a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility, but to a deep trust in those who love us. It is the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

Ground Rules

“Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.”
― Gretel Ehrlich

Football Friday

  “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.”
― Annie Dillard

Foraging Partners

“Where there is great love there are always miracles,’ he said at length, ‘I do not see you as you really are; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
― Willa Cather

Thankful

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” GK Chesterton

Fall Cookies

   “Now the choices you make are not about finding your path. Rather, they are choices to open the path you have found.”
― Ilchi Lee

20 Years of Friendship

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anaïs Nin

Diamonds

“It is the kind of love you can know only if you have felt the intense
hunger that makes your body eat itself at night. The kind you know
only after life shields you from falling bombs or bullets passing through
your body. It is the love that dives naked toward infinity’s reach. I think
it is where God lives.”
― Susan Abulhawa