Today was a clear and beautiful spring day in the Willamette Valley, the kind that makes you reevaluate the idea of work and what we do with our time. The kind of cool breezes mixed with warm sun that calls you outside. I walked my funny dogs through the woods and listened to a poem by John O’Donohue called Beannacht, which means Blessing in Gaelic.

As I listened over and over again to the kindness in every phrase, the descriptions which so captured the places where I have felt lost to myself, I felt blessed just to walk in the amazing woods, to smell the spring coming on, the hear the birds calling. I sat and listened again to the invitation to light and color and was awash again with the gifts that the world offers freely.

Read these words aloud to yourself slowly and deliberately, or better still to someone you love. Feel the colors come out of your mouth like something to taste and see if the blessing does not come to you, and just for a moment see if the beauty of language, meant in love does not wrap around you like a cloak to mind your life.

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colours,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.