Solstice 2023 by Joyce Wycoff

2023 winds down … a fresh year begins… for one moment, day balances night and we pause to consider our lives, our world, our planet. May this collection of images and thoughts stimulate your imagination and invite peace into our new year

- joyce

Joyce Wycoff, Substack: GratitudeMojo.substack.com, jwycoff@gratitudemojo.com

ara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.” — from Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, 1957 2

Follow Your Own Path

e were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope. — from The Marginalian, by Maria Popova

feel that one could

write a wonderful psychology just based on the notion of being called — being called to be yourself and called to transfigure what has hardened or got wounded within you. And it’s also, of course, the heart of creativity, this calling forth all the time, because, like in the work that I do, trying to write a few poems, you never write the same poem twice. You’re always at a new place, and then you’re suddenly surprised by where you get taken to.” – John O'Donohue

Beauty Survives 6

Destination Unknown

e’re all related, you know, most of me is just like thee most of them is just like us most of us is just like … spider monkeys (92%) … elephants (85%) … rats (also 85%) … fruit flies (60%) … banana trees (50%) and all of us began as bits of stardust, single cells cozied together possibly for warmth, or food or a good laugh, romping about for millennia until someone wanted more, someone’s mango looked bigger than mine and war was born me killed thee them killed us slowly we warred our way back to that single cell and, finally, peace, lonely peace.

nce upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.” – from When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, by Terry Tempest Williams

Another Time

Esperanza

ne day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreaming. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance… I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck." — from A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek by Annie Dillard 12

eal yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. with the sound of the river and the waterfall. with the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds. heal yourself with mint, neem, and eucalyptus. sweeten with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile. hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a hint of cinnamon. put love in tea instead of sugar and drink it looking at the stars. heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain. stand strong with your bare feet on the ground and with everything that comes from it. be smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with your forehead. jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier. heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember ... you are the medicine.” — Maria Sabina, Mexican healer and poet

Spirit of Yosemite © Joyce Wycoff, 2023

s they sang, the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him; then something Tookish awoke within him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains and the seas, the pine trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves and wear a sword instead of a walking stick.” – Pryftan fragment in The History of the Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff 16

Clinging Juniper

Gratitude: Stepping Stone to Peace

n lonely lands, life, wild and free, harmonizes with abundance, makes green food from generous sunshine, breathes free air, drinks from abundant waters, feasts on the bounty in reach, finds shelter in protected places, safeguards new life as it ripens. are the trees grateful? do the geese say “thank you? do the waters, still or flowing, speak their gratitudes? or do they just know, understanding the wisdom of enough, aware of their place in balance of all things?

Compassion © Joyce Wycoff, 2023

ll that is gold does not glitter not all who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ash a fire shall be woken a light from the shadows shall spring renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king." – J.R.R. Tolkien

Kaleidoscope of Butterflies © Joyce Wycoff, 2023

Calle Arteaga .. Representing a dozen modern artists overlaid onto a night photo of Calle Arteaga in Jiquilpan, MX

ou do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. – Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"

he Honorable Harvest,

a practice both ancient and urgent, applies to every exchange between people and the Earth. Its protocol is not written down, but if it were, it would look something like this: Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Take only what you need and leave some for others. Use everything that you take. Take only that which is given to you. Share it, as the Earth has shared with you. Be grateful. Reciprocate the gift. Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Bottle Memories

e see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman happens to the human.

What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world. If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human." – Thomas Berry 26

ractice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow." – Kurt Vonnegut

Embracing Uncertainty

Bowing

he world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.” — Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee