Daily Celebrations

Trees Trees, proud  s t a n d i n g   p eo p l e stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying glorious attention, breathing light. strength shelter timeless confidence bending and firm comforting rooted chorus line dancing with the moon, the wind, the clouds framing  bursts  of stars tender rugged  celebration absorbing and releasing life each  holy  branch holding the  power  of the Universe. There.

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." ~ Albert Einstein Born on this day in Ulm, Germany, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) understood what counted and was the embodiment of genius.  "The important thing," he said, "is to not stop questioning." As a child, he loved numbers, but had trouble memorizing facts. He struggled and was expelled from school, but always was passionately curious. Upon college graduation, the man who revolutionized modern thinking was unable to get an academic position and worked as a patent office clerk. On his daily walks to and from work, he thought about physics, exploring the connection between light, space, and time. In 1905, annus mirabilis, the miracle year, Einstein, 26, finished his paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. He applied his Special Relativity to objects moving at constant speeds with the famous equation: E=mc². Einstein proved that energy (E) a

"When we do what we love, again and again, our life comes to hold the fragrance of that thing." ~ Wayne Muller We all need our routines to motivate and keep us going: the same cup for our morning coffee, the comfortable shortcut to get to work on time, that newspaper first thing on Sunday morning. About the importance of routines, American theologian Tyron Edwards said, "Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; action form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny." For 80 years, cellist Pablo Casals would start each day by playing on the piano two preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. He called it "a sort of benediction on the house...a rediscovery of the world in which I have the joy of being a part of." There IS meaning in everything we do. Routines help us to focus, organize, and get things done.  Writer Joan Didion developed a multicolored routine for her writing.  She used yellow paper for n

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." ~ T.S. Eliot I love coffee. The taste, the smell, the experience of drinking that robust brew.  For years, since cramming for finals at the University of Hawaii, coffee has been my favorite, guilty indulgence. So it is with great pleasure that I hear that according to a March 2004 study involving more than 14,000 people in Finland, cups of coffee can ward off the risk of developing adult-onset diabetes... "If you want to improve your understanding," said English essayist Sydney Smith, "drink coffee." The Finns are the world's heaviest coffee drinkers. Here's what their study found: People who drank three to four cups of coffee daily lowered their risk of developing diabetes by 29% for women and 27% for men.  Ten or more cups a day reduced the risk by 79% for women and 55% for men. In January 2004, Harvard researchers studied 125,000 people and found men who drank six cups a day cut thei

"Music is such a beautiful innocent thing for me, a magic thing." ~ Paul McCartney Born in Liverpool, England, James Paul McCartney (1942-) was formally knighted Sir Paul by Queen Elizabeth II on this day in 1997 for his "cultural contributions and service to music." He dedicated his knighthood to fellow ex-Beatles, Ringo Starr and the late George Harrison and John Lennon. McCartney wrote his first song in 1956 and was just 15 years old when he joined Lennon's band, The Quarrymen. Within three years, The Quarrymen transformed into The Beatles.  Along with Lennon, McCartney wrote unforgettable Beatles music of great passion and poignancy. The story goes that Sir Paul woke up in Paris one morning in May 1965 with a beautiful melody in his head "in all the glory and the freshness of a dream," he explained. The musician got out of bed, stepped over to the piano, and wrote the music for  Yesterday , the most covered song of all time.  In 2016,

"Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo." ~ Matsuo Basho Poet Matsuo Basho, ("banana plant", 1644-1694), the son of a low-ranking samurai, created the modern haiku form and is considered to be one of Japan's greatest literary figures. "Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought," he once said. An adherent follower of Zen Buddhism, Basho's book of his travels The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1689), captured prose and haiku.  "Long conversations beside blooming irises/joys of life on the road," he wrote. The haiku poet or "haijin" described nature and life simply, with lightness, to create profound expressive poetic form. Basho's poetry brought spirituality and richness to haiku unheard of before his time. According to Japanese critic and scholar Makoto Ueda, "ideas on verse writing Basho insisted upon" were sabi (loneliness), shiori