your presence

“Mrs. Schwarz” by Edvard Munch

What you do for yourself — any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself — will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.
~ Pema Chödrön
(Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living)

Portraits are to daily faces
As an Evening West,
To a fine – pedantic sunshine –
In a satin Vest!

~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #174)

Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.
~ Jon Kabat-Zinn
(Jon Kabat-Zinn: In His Own Words)

on the morning of the month’s first day

4.30.22 ~ tulips in my garden

But May is a month to be enjoyed, not coldly discussed, and enthusiasm should thrill to the very finger-tips of every one who, on the morning of the month’s first day, hears the thrush, grosbeak, oriole, and a host of warblers as they great the rising sun. And rest assured, dear startled reader, that unless you are astir before the sun is fairly above the horizon you will never know what bird-music really is. It is not alone the mingled voices of a dozen sweet songsters; for the melody needs the dewy dawn, the half-opened flowers, the odor-laden breeze that is languid from very sweetness, and a canopy of misty, rosy-tinted cloud, to blend them to a harmonious whole, and so faintly foreshadow what a perfected world may be.
~ Charles Conrad Abbott
(Days Out of Doors)