Dearest Father God,

In humility, I come to you, to ask you to help me accept myself as I am. I often criticize myself so badly, compare myself to others, that I often feel like I hate myself. I also don't like what I see in the mirror. These bad thoughts about myself make me feel small, resentful and unworthy of your love which makes me unable to love you and others as I should.

Please help me love myself as I am, to see myself as you see me. Please help me to accept my body with all its beauty and perfection just the way you made it. Give me the knowledge and the wisdom to know how to protect and keep it safe and healthy. Help me to never compromise my integrity, to be authentic, truthful and honest in everything, that I never again need to reject myself or sabotage my own happiness.

From now on, let every action, every word, every reaction, every thought, and every emotion of mine, be based on love. Help me, my dearest Father, to trust you fully. Let the power of your love break all the lies I was programmed to believe, all the lies that tell me I am not good enough, strong enough, that I cannot make it. Let the power of your love be present in my whole being that I see myself and everyone through the eyes of your love. Help me that I no longer need to live my life according to other people’s expectations, but by your will.

Dearest Father, help me to know that you are always with me, so that I don't have any fear to make the choices I must make or take actions I must take. Help me to never again be afraid of facing the responsibilities in my life or afraid of facing any problems, to remember that we will resolve them together as they arise. And when I don't do things right, help me to be patient with myself, to have the courage and humility to make the necessary changes and to ask for your forgiveness.

Starting today, dearest Father, help me to live my life being myself and not pretending to be someone else. Help me to love and accept everyone else the way you created them. Please give me wisdom enough, love enough and courage enough to seek your way, your truth and follow it in all I do. Help me to remember that when I reject others, I reject myself and when I reject myself, I reject You. Clean my mind of any emotional poison it has known through abusive words, actions of others and of myself. Please help me to be happy to share my time with my loved ones and to forgive them for any injustice and hurt I feel in my mind. Give me to love my family and friends unconditionally, to find better, loving ways to communicate with everyone, that there is no winner or loser.

Today is a new beginning. Help me to start my life over, help me to love you above all, to love others and treat them with dignity, to be happy to be alive and to no longer live in fear of love. Help me to become great in Kindness, Love, Faith, Forgiveness, Gratitude, Generosity, and Compassion so that I can be at peace with all of your creations forever and ever. Amen.”

Rooting for you,
Immaculee

Say ‘pomegranate’ in French

the anger is there, it’s always there

like a glint on the slide of a knife blade

thinner than a fire pin running through a grenade

(have you ever noticed, by the way, a grenade shape?

curved in like a fig leaf, wired with veins of a maze)

you know, you could hold them both in your palm

I once asked someone, “can you imagine? Holding a heart?”

he said without blinking, “as long as it’s still beating.”

What if a heart had seeds? could bear fruit,

die and be reborn in its own acorn and own accord?

the fruit of the seed is the fruit

the fruit of the grenade is the blood

the fruit of the heart is the same

“People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.” Barbara Kingsolver

Bhakti Yoga

Saturn Lessons

A pic of me when I was sick, under-slept and accidentally put hand sanitizer on my lips thinking it was lip gloss. Saturn lessons are fun. Just kidding, but you don't forget them.

Saturn is the six of swords,
waking up in a cold heat,
the kaa of the carrion crow –
solitary, slow with swift wing-beats

the guttural growl of a Viking
returning from war, with nothing
but a flag held loose like a sapling

It’s you on your knees on the cold earth,
iced grass cutting into your skin through your red skirt

It’s iron-nickel, metallic rock,
negative 8 degree wind-chill shock
in between buildings on a city block

It’s the worn horned hoof of a stallion,
the peak of a mountain, viewed from the top

Little Musings

Picture I took of some sunbabies and peep the heart cloud

Every day I walk to 16th and south to see the wild city garden that grows in a 5 ft. wide, city-block-long crevice space – in between the brick wall of the parking garage and a sling of tiny row homes all packed together like cakes in a glass case. I am not sure who keeps the garden, perhaps the row home owners, but somehow the not knowing is part of the allure. This little slice of magic. In the summer it throbs and drips with color: lavender rose of Sharon, hot pink and orange sherbet hibiscus, full-bushy-blushing pale pink peonies, rainbow colored zinnias, simple Shasta daisies, poker pineapple lilies, blood red dahlias, magenta ruffled irises, violet lily of the Nile, stiff and proud orange gladiolus, light coral trumpet-looking things I don’t know the name of, fluffy aslan marigolds, pure white anemones with polar bear black pupils – all of it grows here, side by side. Like the city itself, filled with a Thai restaurant here, an Italian pizza place there, the Israeli bakery and the Indian food cart all happily coexisting as if the continents never divided anyway. The bees buzz in between the flowers, who, if not for some careful gardener’s hands, would never have known the taste of hydrangea so close to frangipani. But what I come for every day is the water lily. It floats in a small man-made pond, no larger than the width of an arm chair. It peaks its lemon yellow face out of its white flame petals as if to say to me, “hello. I have been waiting for you.” And I smile back and whisper, “thank you for blooming here. Through the soil. In the water. In the city. On this street. In my eyes.” 

Links I Love

Been a minute, but it's back...

Toni Morrison quotes (rest, rest, rest in your powerful peace) also this article about her and this one written by her

What is non-violent communication? Probably the answer to everything

How to suffer like a champ by comedian Pete Holmes (also love of my life)

Why 99% of us don’t fill our true potential… (and no, it’s not because we don’t have Beyonce’s genes... or this girl's)

This Instagram account. That’s it, that’s the description.