stone me to my soul.....

Happy Birthday Van Morrison!

after all these years....

you still

STONE

ME

TO

MY

SOUL...

she slipped on her wings...

" having tired
of the negative words...
she laid them down.
being finished
with the weighted boots...
she burned them.
touching a feather to her tears…
she slipped on her wings…
turned to her sky….
and flew…."

~terri st. cloud

memories....

sunbeams filled with fairy dust....the sweet smell of fresh cut hay....laying in a secret hide away... under the creaking ....popping....tin...reading.....daydreaming....just... being.........memories......

a flash of harmless lightening

“a flash of harmless lightening…
a mist of rainbow dyes…
the burnished sunbeams brightening…
from flower to flower he flies…”

~john banister tabb

two bare feet on the dashboard....

"two bare feet on the dashboard

cheap shades and a tattoo

and a yoo-hoo bottle rollin' on the floorboard..."

~kenny chesney

pencil art

someone sent me these pictures in an email...

i think they are awesome!

there was no info about the artist....

dear artist...

who ever you are....

you do amazing work!

they teach me how to listen.......

“i pray to the birds

because i believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward.

i pray to them because i believe in their existence...

the way their songs begin and end each day...

the invocations and benedictions of earth.

i pray to the birds because they remind me of what i love

rather than what i fear.

and at the end of my prayers...

they teach me how to listen.”

~ terry tempest williams

Turtle helps friend who's flipped over.

always trust your cape......

"life is just a leap of faith...

spread your arms...

hold your breath....

and always trust your cape....."

~eric bibb

dear melancholy.....

i love reading leah dieterich's daily notes.....

this one is so true.....

thx leah..

offer myself humbly........

in the name of the daybreak

and the eyelids of morning

and the wayfaring moon

and the night when it departs...

i swear i will not dishonor

my soul with hatred...

but offer myself humbly

as a guardian of nature...

as a healer of misery...

as a messenger of wonder...

as an architect of peace.

in the name of the sun and its mirrors

and the day that embraces it

and the cloud veils drawn over it

and the uttermost night

and the male and the female

and the plants bursting with seed

and the crowning seasons

of the firefly and the apple...

i will honor all life

wherever and in whatever form

it may dwell

on earth

my home...

and in the mansions

of the stars.

~ diane ackerman

happy birthday big brother.......

my older brother's birthday is this monday......tomorrow there's gonna be a surprise party for his 60th birthday...... like most of us of a certain age......he seems to be hanging on to his glory days........

he was one of the few....the proud.....the marines.........

now he's a harley riding old fart.......


happy birthday...brother
i don't think i've ever told you this...but....
i love you.....

inspiring.........

the money i spend on books and magazines......it's a shameful thing.....but a price i willingly pay to connect with "my kind of people"......artists.....junkers....dreamers......all soooooo inspiring.

i love...love.....love...being invited into their creative spaces....seeing their art....reading how they always felt like outsiders until they connected with others like themselves thru blogging.

none....NONE.....of my friends and family....GET me.....me...the one stopping in the parking lot to pick up rusted washers...."special rocks"....fallen bird nests....THRILLED to find an old cracked teacup in the junk store.....a musty smelling book from 1911....grungy rolls of ribbon....

i'm thanking the universe and the powers that be for the internet...and all the intricate... spidery trails on the web... that link me to my "pack".........

when all the birds are faint...

“when all the birds are faint with the hot sun
and hide in cooling trees
a voice will run from hedge to hedge
about the new mown mead
that is the grasshopper’s
he takes the lead
in summer luxury
he has never done with his delights
for when tired out with fun
he rests at ease
beneath some pleasant weed.”

~john keats

unnoticed......

"that proves you are unusual

returned the scarecrow...

i am convinced the only people

worthy of consideration

in this world

are the unusual ones...

for the common folks

are like the leaves of a tree...

and live and die

unnoticed..."

~lyman frank baum

UP

last night we finished up our bible school with hot air balloon rides......there was so much excitement while the children watched and waited

for the balloon to be inflated....all the kids......young and old....braved the heat for their own version of "UP" lots of smiles....and laughs...
i think the look on this child's face says it all.......

stitches

”One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.

In Stitches, Small, the award-winning children's illustrator and author, recreates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama, where David — a highly anxious yet supremely talented child—all too often became the unwitting object of his parents' buried frustration and rage.

Believing, as most parents do, that they were trying to do the best, David's parents, in fact, did just the reverse: Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag in the family's basement, was convinced that he could cure his little son by shooting him up with heavy doses of radiation, yet with near deadly results; while David's mother, Elizabeth, a tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding parent, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden.

Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that render nightmare in a form that becomes a fairytale in itself, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child, to cancer patient, to troubled teen, whose risky decision to run away from home at 16 — with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist — would become the ultimate survival statement.
A silent movie masquerading as a book, Stitches is as much a memoir as a tale of redemption that informs us that things can get better, that good can emerge from evil, and that art has the power to transform. It is a both a profound gift and a remarkable achievement, a book that renders a broken world suddenly seamless and beautiful again.”

~ http://stitches.davidsmallbooks.com/

it's shameful to see so many people rationalize their bad behavior

on painful childhoods when there are some... like david small...

who are resilient and go on to touch the lives of

some many.....

thank you for sharing mr. small.....