you-- reading this, be ready

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life —

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

~William Stafford

American Poet (1914-1993)

photo: (c) Bruce Behnke 2021

Pearl City, Hawaii, U.S.A.

please be kind

The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, 

the more kindness he can find in other people.

You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.

Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.

Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. 

Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature,

 only this kind of love can be called true love,

 and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life.

 This is the foundation of the world.

Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.

 

~ Leo Tolstoy

photo: Pearl city, Hawaii

(c) bruce behnke 2021

waterfall refreshment

A visit to Narita San Temple and its gardens is always refreshing. It's how I usually end my trips to Japan. 

In hot weather, a waterfall meditation provides the most lasting comfort.



Narita-san Shinshō-ji

成田山 新勝寺






photo: ©bruce behnke 2016

A cool mountain stream

 

I'm posting this 2016 photo for all of you suffering the extreme heat of this summer.  This is a cold, clear mountain stream flowing in the mountains of Aichi Prefecture.  Just standing there taking this photo allowed me to feel how the water  cooled this deep valley;  I remember the soothing feeling even to this day, five years later.

Envision coolness.

photo:

Aichi Prefecture, Japan

(c) 2016 bruce behnke

Summer is for swimming

 

Have a cool and colorful summer!

photo: Pearl City, Hawaii

(c) bruce Behnke 2021

Summer Solstice

 

...I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? ~Mary Oliver (excerpt from "The Summer Day")

(c) Mary Oliver 1992

photo: (c) bruce Behnke 2021

Juneteenth

 

"I love that Juneteenth isn’t a holiday celebrating the anniversary of Lincoln’s September 22, 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, but is a day that spotlights June 19, 1865, months after the end of the Civil War, when slavery’s end finally was enforced. The years of separation between those two events sums up the reality Black Americans have always lived with. That today, 156 years later we finally have a national holiday honest about this inequity is indeed a very big deal. It’s just the first step in solving our racism problem, but nothing is possible without first steps." ~Bill Penzey photo: bruce behnke (c) 2014