July 2022 – Radiance Within

Lettuce Leaf

July 27th, 2022

Have you ever held a leaf of lettuce up to the light of your kitchen window while it dripped into the sink after you rinsed it?

Have you ever taken a few moments to examine its ruffles of tissue and intricately woven veins?

The leaf in my hands is a vessel for streaming light and holding water. It has the potential for being so much more than what I plan to do with it.

What can I do? This living thing has caught me in a moment. It’s revealed its true identity. My vision is x-ray. I see what it is to capture light, to be a light being.

The image of an entire tree with roots, trunk, branches, and leaves is imprinted on a piece of lettuce. Held up to the light, it’s like a photographic negative or a blueprint artfully recorded on what will soon be my lunch.

And to think that such beauty, such an intricate network, can nourish, can be broken down and absorbed into another body, sustaining its life, my life.

I will dress my salad in humility and toss it with gratitude. I will ask forgiveness from what I must destroy because I seek to live, because I need to eat.

All I can do is notice. All I can do is open my eyes.

-Radiance Writer

July 26, 2022
Poetry Has a Place

July 22nd, 2022

The world needs the poetry of places, people, and passages. Lyricism, thoughts in verse, and whispered prayers bolster us against the machinations of life, to keep us from degrading into hollow images, like those in video games maneuvering at the behest of others, for the purpose of accumulating endless points.

We need the poetry of places, people, and passages because inside we are soft. We are real. We need to love and be loved. We need to care and be cared for. We need hugs and kisses and warm words and gentle gestures. We need beauty of thought, form, and substance. We need elevation and transcendence.

We need space for thoughts and feelings to meld into the quiet grandeur of perspective, meaning, purpose, the will to go on. Between the industrial, the marketable, the lucrative, the commercial, and the profitable, we need a balm, something to seal the hard, jagged cracks formed from our efforts to make it in this world.

We need the poetry of thoughts and deeds, words, dances, intricate forms, colors, and music. We need candles and bowls of water, skylights and stained glass, statues, icons, and mosaics, incense and chimes, high ceilings and arched portals.

We need muses, reminders of higher ideals and humanity. We need places that capture our imaginations and feed our souls, sanctuaries to nourish our dreams and heal our broken hearts and anguished minds. We need places to mark our passages, temples, churches, synagogues, mosques, open fields, forest canopies, and sandy beaches. Places to honor and elevate our fleeting, noble lives.

Poetry has a place wherever the silence is full, wherever depth of feeling and thought is palpable, wherever the human spirit is striving and thriving, wherever the colors are rich and multifaceted, clarified and true. Where people gather in solitude and in community. Where silence is sacred and all are reminded that the divine dwells within them. Where spirits of the departed linger whispering to us of inspiration, daring us to hope.

-Radiance Writer

July 21, 2022

Lettuce Leaf

Poetry Has a Place