Gratitude

New Year, New Life, and Continued Blessings

Dear Readers —

HAPPY NEW YEAR WISHES AND GRACIOUS BLESSINGS

TO ALL OF YOU!

We wanted to take a moment to express our strong gratitude to you for being on this journey with us.

We expect we all can agree that 2025 has been filled with many challenges — environmental, political, and technological — in our collective lives, and we hope that, in addition, it has been filled with bountiful personal pleasures and unexpected gifts for each of you.

We are holding out for a new year that steadily uplifts all of our souls and spirits, and that brings new promise, in various creative forms, for every one of us.

Below is an offering of Janet’s newest poem, a gift that, last week, moved through during early morning walks.

From Our Hearts to Yours,

Janet and Alan

***You can also listen, above, to Janet reading her poem***

Consume the Moon
 
We have already littered
the lunar landscape,
and now there is talk of Mars.
 
Meanwhile — here —
where all the real stuff happens,
the morning sky,
as always,
consumes the moon
as she slips her
silver vessel
into daylight shoals.
 
I envy those mouthfuls
of magnificence,
the luminescent dust
that pearled the night sky
now tickling the tongue;
those leftovers —
slivered morsels
enriching and exciting.
 
Perhaps,
for the great blue,
it is only an amuse bouche,
a few kisses of delight
tossed into that ocean.
 
Perhaps, more intimately,
it is communion —
the thinning white wafer,
the alabaster chalice,
an evanescent union
downed and drowning
in celestial sea.
 
Perhaps it is
an illustrious story
of ruin and resurrection:
 
Persephone, Part II

The Seizing
The Sorrow
and
The Newly Sown
 
told again and again
in nightly replenishment,
with every seeming
death and disappearance
a renewal and return,
that grand drumbeat
thrumming through
all creation.
 
All I know is,
sometimes
I scarcely can breathe
while witnessing
these subtle sacraments,
the wondrous things
that happen
when we least are looking,
that call to us,
beguiling us to see our story
written in the firmament,
to remember where we are,
who we are —
shiny moons, too,
burnished and bereaved,
needing to yield,
to let ourselves be ravished,
to rejoice in
what really goes on here,
if only we will lift eyes
to the gaze of myriad galaxies
mirroring our grandeur.
 
 
Janet D. Coster