(Photo: Part of my route with the: PIT count, January 2019, http://hsh.sfgov.org/research-reports/2019pitcount/)
In little glimpses of where you are coming from, you describe your childhood to a friend:
how you spent summer nights sleeping under the tamarisks, on the cool lawn, with the chickens pecking at you in the morning;
how your sister and you’d ride your ponies with the neighbor-girl Dawn, how Dawn lost her thumb, how you hardly learned to ride a bike;
how you’d invite friends over to your “pool:” four old plastic trash cans you’d fill with water you’d all stand in and chat;
how you had dozens of cats (and, in the rare photos you have to recall those childhood days, there are cats and cats);
how you, an awful budding violinist, would perform concerts for the horses;
how you aren’t frightened by darkness or solitude or most of God’s creatures;
how, even now, a middle-aged woman in the city, you find ways to celebrate the beauty all around.
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For January 16, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings offers:
“Let the Beauty We Love”
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
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What are the hundreds of ways you celebrate beauty?