beauty does not linger, it only visits...

As you can see, with Spring rounding the corner in these parts, some seasonal cleaning was

in order for my blog. Like a great deal in my life these days, it was time to toss out a lot that was weighing me down and simplify and clarify. As Parker Palmer writes: "Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility: for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger's act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again." (Let Your Life Speak)

So just as I am shifting gears with my writing, so too the look of this page. This morning, while waiting for Dianne to have her second epidural to address the two herniated discs she has been enduring for the past six months, I was awakened (again) to how fast this past year has rushed by us.  At this time last year we were madly cleaning our house and making last minute arrangements for our impending sabbatical.  Our son-in-law only half jokingly referred to it as our "magical mystery tour" - and indeed it was all of that and more. And now, a year later, we are still sorting out the blessings of all that beauty, rest and solitude.

John O'Donohue writes that "beauty does not linger, it only visits." Since our return, I know this truth in new ways and still long to walk through Parc Baldwin with my sweetheart at the start of a new day. "Beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, " O'Donohue continues. "it calls us to feel, think and act Beautiful for a life without delight is only half a life." Not as an invitation to selfishness, hedonism or quietude, but rather as a way of savoring what is real: "Beauty does not restrict its visitation only to those whom fortune or circumstances favor. Indeed, it is often the whisper and glimpses of beauty which enable people to endure on desperate frontiers. Even, and especially, in the bleakest times, we can still discover and awaken beauty; these are precisely the times when we need it most." (The Invisible Embrace: Beauty)

And so the sorting, pruning, discarding and savoring continues.