Category: Tenneson Woolf Poetry

Corner of a picture of my grandparents taken 40 years ago. A candle in a glass jar, one third of its 72 hours burned. Stones collected from a 2018 road trip with a best buddy. A potted houseplant vine. Post-it notes of names of people from a recent gathering. It’s all a kind of altar in my office. The simple of it is that I’m a person that values physical and symbolic artifacts.

I’ve been asking people lately, near and dear, and often — What is the simple story here, now? It’s a form of the question, “What is happening?” It’s a form of the question, “What matters now?”

I love the responses. There’s a little extra permission to get to the values. To get centered. To get simple. In the simple story, there is room created for the more nuanced stories that are still working themselves out.

It’s in all of that spirit that I wrote these guiding words this morning. Thinking of grandparents, stones, and people I admire.

Live a good day.
Live a good hour.
Live a good moment.

Opened
in heart.

Going well
within 
and with others.

For inspiration.

When I wish navigating guidelines, I suppose in overarching attempt to live a good life, I so often return to varied surrenders to flow, and to varied welcomes of joy. Images and words of flow and joy come calling to me, collecting me again, centering me again. It is the Zen part of me that so appreciates a simplicity.

And thus, a few impressions this morning.

ad

It is true for me,
perhaps for many,
that I, and we, seek to feel
states of flow.

I, and perhaps we, must
know Life’s irrepressibility.

Emphasizing kindness
and practicing consciousness
the best that I can,
the best that we can,
within ourselves
and with others.

It is true for me,
perhaps for many,
that there is deeply satisfying joy
to do so.

A bow to the way that any of us live from flow and joy.
A bow for the way that flow and joy live us.

I’m glad for a weekend in Southern Utah. I’m glad for images that inspire. For me, in this photo above, it’s the vista of red rock mountains, held by expansive blue skies, towering next to sweeping lava fields, that are speckled with persistent desert flowers and other vegetation — yup, that will do it.

Sometimes, we live in the spectacular. Or give our energy to the spectacular. Sometimes, for me, for many of us, the spectacular is found in the most simple. In love. In friendship. In breath. In opened heart. In lettuce wraps. In snuggle.

I often find I’m most alive when returned to the simple, to moment of breathless vista, be that the outer landscape of reaching geography, or the inner landscape of reaching heart.

I wish
often 
the simple.

In thought.
In feeling.

The simple
that speckles
within it all.

To have that
guide.