I am the Woman

Painting by Soledad Fernández

“I am the woman at the water’s edge,

offering you oranges for the peeling,

knife glistening in the sun.

This is the scent and taste

of my skin: citron and sweet.

Touch me and your life will unfold

before you, easily as this skirt

billows then sinks,

lapping against my legs, my toes

filtering through the rivers silt.

Following the current out to sea,

I am the kind of woman

who will come back to haunt

your dreams, move through your

humid nights the way honey

swirls through a cup of hot tea.”

by Shara McCallum

Past - Present

Art by Patty Maher

"We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present."

― Marianne Williamson

Flowering Love on a Starry Night

Art by Christian Schloe

 

“She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - The Little Prince

All that is human

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - VenusVerticordia (1868)

I am not interested in enlightenment if it means detachment from the emotional body, the earth plane, the challenges of being human. I'm interested in enrealment, because it means that my most spiritual moments are inclusive, arising right in the heart of a heartfelt immersion in all that is human: agony & ecstasy, laundry list & unity consciousness, earth & sky, joy & sorrow, fresh mangos & stale bread. Its all God, even the dust that falls off my awakening heart.

 

~ Jeff Brown

Voice of Beauty 

Russian Beauty Wearing a Kokoshnik by Konstantin Egorovich Makovsky

“the voice of beauty speaks softly;

it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls”

― Friedrich Nietzsche