Title: graceriver

Gender: Female

Age: 42

Sun Sign: Aries

Chinese Sign: Fire Goat

Location: here

I'm a teacher, a writer, a sometimes thinker, and a photographer, in love with paradox, addicted to the promises of connection and the restorative space of solitude, sweet on the generative power of conversation and the kindness of time alone.

I'm a traveler and a bit of a hermit, a seer of smallness, and a watcher of hawks and herons.

I'm a lover of silence, voice, story, ancient oak trees, the smoke of burning sage, rosemary and its tag of scent in my palm, Neil Young's harmonica genius, thrift store plunder, and abandoned shacks in the countryside, the kind with lots of rust and insurgent green growing out of tin roofs and weary wooden beams collapsing into earth.

I'm weary and wary of the status quo. Hungry for rejection of old rules and paradigms and for the nourishment of so much that has been cast aside and disallowed.

I'm still learning how to see, how to understand and listen to words and the spaces in between them.

Simply trust. Do not the petals flutter down, just like that?
–Issa

My Business is Circumference.
–Emily Dickinson

Whether it happened so or not I do not know, but if you think about it you can see that it is true.
–Black Elk

Being born is going blind and bowing down a thousand times.
–Townes van Zandt

The alphabet of grace is full of gutturals.
–Frederick Buechner

Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.
–Linda Hogan, from Dwellings

What you are looking for is what is looking.
–St. Francis of Assissi

“At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May's newfangled mirth;
But like of each thing that in season grows.”

–William Shakespeare, from Love's Labour's Lost

Here is what sings unrestricted faith.
–Walt Whitman

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people in this light.”
–Lewis Carroll

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
–Wendell Berry

One can live magnificently in this life if one knows how to work and how to love.–Leo Tolstoy

If the wind means me, I'm here! Here.
–Theodore Roethke

The sound of the water says what I think.-
-Chuang-tzu

Trust shows the way. —Hildegarde of Bingen

This is the time. This is the place. This is the vastness. Right here is paradise. Always. Always.
–Byron Katie

I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing. –John Cage

I think we all have a core that's ecstatic, that knows and that looks up in wonder. We all know that there are marvelous moments of eternity that just happen. We know them. –Coleman Barks

If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.–Alan Watts

You cannot avoid paradise. You can only avoid seeing it. –Charlotte Joko Beck

May my body be a prayerstick for the world. – Roshi Joan Halifax

Between living and dreaming
there is a third thing
guess it
–Antonio Machado

Poetry
says
what I keep silent
keeps silent
what I have to say,
dreams
what I forget.
–Octavio Paz

But I'm the metallic nimbus, the ring
chained to space, clouds, spheres
that touches hurtling mute waters,
and again defies the infinite inclemency.
Pablo Neruda

What he has not to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.
–John Berryman, from Dream Song 1

I am homesick for a  country. I have never been there. I will never go there. But where the clouds remember me distinctly.
–Hilde Domin

The truth is where it is, and sometimes it's in the candy store.
–Bob Dylan

A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
–Wallace Stevens

I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.
–Diane Arbus

“Nothing,” said Moon. “I was trying to focus one way or the other and I got confused and fell over. Let that  be my epitaph.”
–Tom Stoppard

What does the swallow know of the owl's insomnia?
–Mark Strand

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
–William Stafford

Linkages:
http://www.webdelsol.com/
http://www.webspawner.com/users/broper/
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/
http://www.theonion.com/content/ads/premercial.php?target=L2NvbnRlbnQvaW5kZXg=
http://www.parisreview.com/
http://www.sustainabilityed.org/
http://www.cedarhillenrichment.org/  this is not far from where I live…
http://fusionanomaly.net/underworld.html
http://darkblooms.blogspot.com/
http://www.grist.org/
http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/lawrence.htm
http://www.santosha.com/
http://literati.net/Silko/
http://www.gratefulness.org/
http://www.stashtea.com/
http://www.cosmicwind.net/800/Cmwl/SiteMap/CmwlSiteMap.html

http://www.poems.com/
http://www.conduit.org/
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Home.jsp
http://www.folkschool.com/  the John Campbell Folk School, in Brasstown, NC
http://www.keeppickensbeautiful.com/ 
http://www.punkplanet.com/
http://www.nodepression.net/
http://www.dirtylinen.com/
http://www.savedarfur.org/content?splash=yes Save Darfur
http://www.alternet.org/
http://www.orionsociety.org/
http://pickensanimalrescue.org/
http://www.libs.uga.edu/darchive/hargrett/maps/maps.html rare map collection at the university of georgia
http://www.uga.edu/gamuseum/index.html the georgia museum of art, in athens, ga.
http://www.epicurious.com/
http://www.vegetariantimes.com/
http://www.peets.com/fvpage.asp?rdir=1& Peets Coffee
http://obata.wilderness.net/ Chiura Obata link
http://www.birdsnest.com/wyeth.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoQNj2tlZhg  the Buena Vista Social Club

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UmKVylIzmOE Damien Rice's song Volcano

http://youtube.com/watch?v=iip-1p3XYFU John Fahey tribute

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GT0QFM78fpo Alison Krauss

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CaohkHuHgXU&mode=related&search=  Mountains and Mountains of Things….