Blog from my Heart

I recently celebrated a birthday and it was in a beautiful snowy spot in the mountains and woods of Colorado.  I particularly love this picture of the Spruce trees surrounded by the Aspens.

In a cooperative and loving spirit, I want to share a poem that a dear friend handwrote to me for my birthday in 2009 written by John O’Donohue. The theme behind this message is that you are loved, and makes me grateful for friends, my many blessings and what I continue to learn through my mistakes and disappointments.

Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day
The blueprint of your life
Would begin to glow on earth,
Illuminating all the faces and voices
That would arrive to invite
Your soul to growth.

Praised be your father and mother
Who loved you before you were,
And trusted to call you here
with no idea who you would be.

Blessed be those who have loved you
Into becoming who you were meant to be
Blessed be those who have crossed your life
With dark gifts of hurt and loss
That have helped to school your mind
In the art of disappointment.

When desolation surrounded you,
Blessed be those who looked for you
And found you, their kind hands
Urgent to open a blue window
In the gray wall formed around you.

Blessed be the gifts you never notice,
Your health, eyes to behold the world,
Thoughts to countenance the unknown,
Memory to harvest vanished days,
Your heart to feel the world’s waves,
Your breath to breathe the nourishment
Of distance made intimate by earth.

On this echoing-day of your birth,
May you open the gift of solitude
In order to receive your soul;
Enter the generosity of silence
To hear your hidden heart
know the stillness of serenity
To be enfolded anew
By the miracle of your being.

In an odd way this poem evokes life and death as I think about praising my mom and dad who loved me before I was…and trusted to call me here with no idea of who I would be.  The miracle of life is so incredible, and in a similar vein the pain we feel when we lose our parents evokes such feelings of grief.

I think this is a contemplative poem to recall once a year, and I imagine depending on my life’s events, different sections will speak to me.