[L, diary, ephēmeris] 1) BLOG

This photograph, lifted from a calendar, lived on the kitchen wall for most of the first nine years of building PILAR. It was everything I dreamed of for our life aboard her--sturdiness, simplicity, sailing. Home.

...and though our sailing years were short, PILAR is still a dream come true...soon, she will fulfill a dream for someone else. 

The history of PILAR's voyages, along with details of her construction & inventory, are directly available from me with this link: CONTACT. An abundance of photos of PILAR can also be found on this website, here: PILAR. I can also send video links to events such as removing & re-stepping both masts, that include more PILAR 'adventures' in the Philippines. 

The decision to list PILAR for sale should have been made two years ago--but then I was still able to take care of her, live aboard and respond to any emergency. Now? Now, there have been Changes that were not Choices, but I have been blessed to have two good workers, Renato & Jomar, who now maintain my boat. I am grateful for their Filipino patience because the process of letting go has been hard to adjust to. When I originally uploaded this post (May 3rd) on my Home Page, I left it up to the reader to understand PILAR was for sale. I could not write the words, FOR SALE.  Today, it feels good to celebrate...well, everything.

Ten days from today, August 11, 2026, will be PILAR's 42nd birthday: 

Finally....to anyone longing to buy their own boat:

“…maybe the most important consideration in the long run, the boat has to sing to you, that it is yours and will be yours for years to come. Maybe time will come to part with it but as long as you have it, it should be the best, most lovely looking, most comfortable for YOU, the skipper, and no one else. Then all of the problems, faults and blemishes will be fixed much easier and with more enthusiasm than doing it with the boat you just tolerate or worse—indifferent to.”

(1834 hrs.) Friday, July something, (2024?)

Away from Pilar for several nights, I’m again sitting in her companion way with a glass of wine, watching the sunset and luxuriating in the soft breeze flowing over me, cooling the sweaty efforts of opening up the boat and getting reestablished inside.

How much time do I have left to be able to do this; to savor these beautiful, peaceful, heart-fulfilling simple moments of being home again?

The sky darkens, silhouetting Pilar’s Main mast shrouds. Though they are also dark, I can still see the white paint on the deadeyes, and the softer gray on the galvanized wire serviced with painted rope. 

Traditionally, shrouds were black, served with hemp then painted with a thick and messy slurry of tar and linseed oil. The rigging was Bill’s responsibility while I was completing the interior construction of our waterborne home. After launching, maintenance of Pilar for the next fifteen years was both of our jobs but these last fifteen years have been completely mine. 

It was daunting, the tasks Bill knew best. I simply followed his ways.

Now, when I look at the main mast shrouds of my old-fashioned sailboat, I look with pride on her hardwood deadeyes, rope lanyards, and the fully parceled-and-served galvanized wire that supports the mast.

I remember how hard the black preservative was on them, soaking up the sun’s heat, drying and cracking them.

They are white now. White and gray. ‘Like a dignified ‘Lady’s’ Yacht,’  I think, and smile. 

It’s fanciful to feel that rigging could feel grateful for new coats of white and gray. Silly, even, to imagine audible relief from the quick and dirty ways of ancient sailors. I know that alternative materials were limited for those voyaging workboats. I also know the yachts of the rich tarred their rigging., too. But WHY, in these modern times, did Bill remain unthinkingly faithful to tarring? Less heat-absorbing paint would have been kinder.

I love my Pilar as a mother loves her child. Anticipating the silent needs for boats as well as children requires introspection, not rote. Why did it take ME so long to realize I didn’t have to be slavishly bound to "it’s always been done this way…?” 

It was because Bill had great admiration for traditional skills. And I admired and respected Bill's knowledge and skills.

My beautiful Lady's yacht. We've grown older together. Pilar is still young, not yet a dowager, but when she is. she deserves to still be loved.

For those who wondered but didn't ask...

The desire to resume writing--emails/journal/blog posts & Must Do lists--has returned. It has been inspired by the above photo, a journal entry, seven years old.  Rediscovered, it reconfirms the reality of my life for the past twenty-four years of living in a rural fishing community in the Philippines. The bittersweet irony is that for these last seven years, I continued to debate the obvious reality of Malouf's epiphany as my own:  I will be seventy-seven this year--what foolishness have I been thinking these past seven years when my life was already  overflowing with blessings?

I was thinking I was still young, that's what, because I still FELT young. I still felt capable of living one last chapter for fulfilling dreams I'd let languish. I 'd dreamed I could write a book. A workbook for creatively getting through crisis.  Specifically, I still dreamed I could finish the  180 pages of a manuscript I'd begun in Hawaii, thirty-one years ago...if only I had time to myself.

I have been dogged in regular attempts to resume writing, stealing time from Saturday Art students and maintaining Pilar, but it is time to stop dreaming I am a free spirit with plenty of time for dreams to come true if I just click my heels three time (or was it five?). It is time to fully embrace  being a meaningful member of this culture, this community,  and instead focus gratefully on sharing precious moments of a good life in a foreign culture. A life that Malouf accurately confronts me with when he writes:  "...here is the life you have tried to throw away..."

...and then there is this earlier post:

A Rest is Not Defeat

“…bittersweet is… an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize all humans know – or will know – loss and suffering, we can turn to each other…the place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly – you care enough to act."

--Susan Cain--

Bittersweet; How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole,

Rediscovered Saturdays

(excerpts from letters to long-time friend & patron, Patricia Lucas)

Saturday, August 5, 2017

It is Saturday evening.  I am still at the house, waiting for my laptop and cell phone to charge before I take them home to Pilar tonight.  There was a ‘brown out’ until an hour ago, another of an increasing number of days without power during summer's rainy monsoon season, and my boat's small batteries aren't up to charging all of my electronic needs.

Nevertheless, though today's plans were altered by the lack of power, it was a fantastically wonderful day.  One of the best.  We worked all morning in the garden, digging weeds, preparing new beds, planting seeds and transplanting about a thousand young shoots of arugula.  I love arugula.  (THANK THE GODS SINCE I’M SET FOR LIFE WITH WHAT WE JUST TRANSPLANTED!)

I actually have sugar peas growing, as well—tried to grow them the last couple of years but they didn’t take.  Or were ‘taken’ by bugs before they were able to produce.  This year I think I’ll be able to introduce my team to what REAL peas are.  They’ve never had them.  Haven’t a clue how unbelievably sweet they are fresh, uncooked, eaten straight from the vine while standing in the garden.  I recently braved (against my own good judgment) buying a bag of frozen peas, but they were horrible.  OLD.  TOUGH.  NO FLAVOR.  And, of course, canned peas are nothing short of an abomination.

I also indulged in planting Delphinium seeds.  Cannot imagine they will actually grow, but Resty Joy (10) was beside herself looking at the picture on the package (me too; 69) so I will do everything I can think of to ensure their well-being if they do sprout.  My garden is wondrously lush but predominantly green which even the variety of textures can’t compensate enough for the lack of vibrantly colored contrasts that abundant flowers offer.  I’ve tried marigolds and calendulas (good pest deterrents) but they’re still not enough…greedy, aren’t I?

The best treat today happened while I was in the garden staking the last green pea vines. When I came into the house, my three workers and two students were in the kitchen preparing lunch, while Joy Joy and her brother John Resty (12) were busy making pinwheels. I was thrilled with their initiative and said I wanted a hundred more to put in the garden, so after lunch, we all ‘played’ at making differently colored designs, stringing them on drinking straws and bamboo sticks, and finally hanging them to an upper edge of what was last year’s string bean arbor.  It wasn’t a hundred, of course, but the pleasure was as if it were.  

So, while they were in the garden stringing pinwheels everywhere--thoroughly enjoying themselves, their laughter drifting into the kitchen--I dug out my Swedish Abelskiever pans and mixed up a double batch of the round ‘pancake’ balls (stuffing them with a small filling of peanut butter-pineapple-raisins) for our 3 pm snack.  

Afterward, while the guys fertilized the garden beds and the students wrote in their journals of what we’d done today, I sat with Ludy to discuss further editing to her autobiography.  Suddenly it was time for me to do pay envelopes while everyone else cleaned up the messes everywhere and then off they went, seven of them between two small motorbikes…leaving me waving goodbye, alone and awash in a flood of grateful well-being.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Yesterday was another immensely fulsome Saturday, with morning work in the garden as usual.  Afternoons are now for our other projects, what used to be Livelihood Skills development but that aspect has diminished as work on the house and PILAR has increased, although making art of any kind is still enjoyed. During the week following last Saturday, I realized the pinwheel project had been John Resty's idea, not Joy's.  She had begun something else, elsewhere, but had joined John John when I saw them crafting the pinwheels.

JoyJoy is always off to the side, quietly separate from what others are doing. Industrious, but very private. So, while all of us were working at the one table making our pinwheels, she was over in the corner at the far end of the house, as usual, working on what was NOT pinwheels, but a paper doll house.  My misunderstanding what she was working on was comic... initially, she had taken the tape dispenser for herself but after we realized it was gone and we needed it back, she'd been running back and forth to our table to take numerous snippets of tape for her project, refusing to bring her work and join us at our table. I'd just assumed she needed the tape for pinwheels like the rest of us.  I only happened to glimpse her paper project at the end of the day, when she slipped it onto a corner of the bookcase shelf while everyone helped clean up our mess.

A few days later, suddenly recalling that brief moment, I was curious to know what she’d done. At the shelf, I found a quite complex little paper house with a table and chairs made with bits of drinking straws & paper taped together, and a tiny open box filled with confetti-like snippets of straws. Yesterday, she told me those were 'food' provisions in the kitchen area.

Studying her work done last week, I realized it was the second time she'd silently crafted a small house.  The first one had been made from a sheet of packing Styrofoam. I just happened to find it, broken up, in the shed outside where we keep the recycling sacks.

So, okay, long story shortened...thinking that Renato and the guys could help her build a REAL doll house, a properly proportioned, more permanent doll house, as well as a great project of them, too, doll houses were then Googled. I was appalled by the cloying extravagances, so made a file of only native-style houses rather than the fantasy dream houses for the very rich, hoping to keep her away from such garbage. Then, when in town, I bought large sheets of good quality multi-colored paper because I thought they'd not only be easier to cut, but stimulating for her to begin crafting a model we could, afterward, construct with more substantial materials.  I'd rejected buying heavier board stock, black on one side, white on the other, as depressingly colored, plus more difficult to cut or make design changes. 

Yesterday, when I asked if she'd like a bigger, real doll house, and showed her the file I'd made, she was ecstatic.  Guess what?  It was lucky I had sheets of that depressing black and white board because she immediately rejected the colored papers.  So, while I was momentarily distracted by John Resty, who was thrilled with the colored papers for his project of building a kite, Joy Joy found my stash of small cutoffs from boards used elsewhere (including a blue/white one, actually) and had taken them to her corner of the house and begun arbitrarily cutting new walls for her doll house when I caught up with her.  The pieces she'd picked were too small and too few for any real progress to be made, so I offered her what I had in black/white, suggesting that she could use the colored papers to hide the black but she was decisive, No, Thank you, no color was needed. Black/white was just fine.

I cannot tell short stories, can I?  Well, I will do so now:

By the end of the afternoon, John Resty's kite was made using yellow spinnaker cloth)

but without enough wind to fly it properly. 

J's doll house has begun but is not yet completed.  BIG SMILES EVERYWHERE as the group left. 

Oh!  Have to say that part of the excitement was when we were googling kites and seeing the AMAZING kite entries to contests.  We were astounded--THRILLED! AWED!--and enriched. I love the internet.  I would be totally bereft if not able to learn that such things exist; my little group's world would be poignantly smaller, too.

THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Author & Speaker

Mon, Nov 6, 2023 at 1:54 -Almost a year ago I began composing this post inspired by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TedTalk:

“They sat around, reading the book themselves,
listening to me read the book,
and a kind of paradise was regained.”
—Alice Walker—

"How impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story,

particularly as children...

"...how to create a single story:

show a people as one thing,
as only one thing,
over and over again,
and that’s what they become.

“Stories matter. Many stories matter.
Stories have been used to dispossess and malign
 but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.
Stories can break the dignity of a people,
but stories can also repair the broken Dignity.

“The consequences of the single story is this:
it robs people of dignity.
It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.
It emphasizes how we are different, rather than how we are similar."

--a final thought--
“… when we reject a single story,
when we recognize that there is never a single story about any place,
we regain a kind of paradise.“

THE DANGER OF SINGLE STORIES - (2009) TedTalk

--Vincent Van Gogh--

LOVE AFTER LOVE

by Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life,

whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

_______________________

"The ancient Greeks believed that the oldest wines, between 60 and 90 years of age, produced so few clusters that the ones remaining were the most flavorful of any wines.  The plants invested all the remaining resources in the last clusters of their lives."

Trent Prezler, LITTLE AND OFTEN

Yes, I'd almost finished composing a post that reflected the unexpected richness of aging for humans as well as grape vines, but when I looked at the collection of unfinished drafts (19, to be exact; the earliest from 2017) I realized that each signified an elegant harvest during these 'last clusters' of my life. It is time that they are shared.

This was drafted January 19th, 2023:

It's been ten days since completing and uploading the video  Being Alive to YouTube:

Now, rereading the blog post I made the next day, I can easily see how benumbed I was from the seemingly Herculean effort needed to reach closure.  This post will probably be equally rough for the same reason: further "closure"  pressure for this edited copy of Being Alive_#2 for cellphones to be uploaded to YouTube:

Why?  Because the beautiful Zapfino font in the first version received feedback that it wasn't readable on cell phones. Ugh. All 26 slides of text had to be changed. (can you see the difference between the two photos?)

When I'd finished the first video, I had no expectations of receiving much feedback. The whole world has been in rough shape and still struggles to regain lost equilibrium these past two/three years--not just me. My own ability to respond and connect with others has been, sadly, almost nil.

But things change, and the new year wafts a sweet scent of rejuvenation; good tidings have arrived for the video! The first  came from my family: 

Tue, Jan 10
Your video is so touching. I love the prose
(I love Maria’s weekly work- she’s one of the most incredible writers I’ve ever read)--and the music!
The people in your life are beautiful.—Keri

Wed, Jan 11
It was nice to see your video on Facebook as I could not get it to work on email. It’s lovely!
I am wondering if you’re going to do more, and is it the start of a new direction
for you, documenting what you have done? —Vicki

...not just arrived but they've MULTIPLIED beyond belief simply because Todd Walton graciously allowed me to use his music for the video and then generously shared it with his friends, as well:

Todd Walton
To: Diane Pool
Thur, Jan12
Diane, a few of the responses I’ve gotten from friends I sent the link to. You have a hit on your hands!

wow, that is beautiful, and how far-reaching your art has become.
I wanted the photos to last longer, I'll have to watch again and again,
sometimes for photos, sometimes for words. —Deb Kvaka

How wonderful of her to do this. Lovely prose
(got inspiration for a title or two) and your piano...perfect. ?Hope that was a picture of her with the young boy near the beginning.  Just think how many lives your words and music have touched. I'm envious. Bravo.—Nolan Winkler

Thanks for sharing!  This video moved me deeply.  The photos are poignant and the poetry is truth (at least mine!).  Your music takes those aspects to a much deeper and richer level than they would otherwise be.  Lovely!! —Barbara Birchard?

Thu, Jan 12
D - Here’s another from Elias Steinbuck, our dear friend and neighbor who helps everybody around here all the time.

I did watch this little video you forwarded along and found it to be just beautiful
and super moving...once I got over my own ego trip of
'what the hell am I really doing to make the world a better place'
I had a good cry and maybe that was the point.

A good cry! You made something that helped Elias have a good cry. Hurray!  By the way, a couple of people I sent the link to say they are followers of Maria’s blog

Fri, Jan 13 at 3:33 AM? - this just in:

Thank you so much for sending me this beautiful video. Everything about it is inspiring,
and your music fits perfectly. I started to imagine what miracles our country could accomplish
if we could only replace grievance with gratitude. Just knowing that there are people in this world
like your friend Diane is a ray of hope. —Jim Shaw

...and now a blog post from Todd, too: please follow the link and further explore his Writing, Music, Films, & Photography. Todd's blog post for today is a lovely example of his belief in practicing kindness to heal our social alienations.

I wrote to a friend yesterday, "I'm struggling to write my first blog post since late May,"  lamenting that it was taking far longer to compose than I'd thought it would..."I'm out of practice!"

Frustrated and ashamed, it was obvious that even when greatly motivated by the greatly inspiring Maria Popova, inspiration is not enough.  It is only a small catalyst to the need for experienced articulation--the plain old habit of writing while thinking critically--if epiphanies are to be successfully communicated. It takes concerted effort--skill--to produce enticing reading, as she does.

If I had not gotten fat and lazy, discouraged from the habit by wondering, WHO CARES?  the above paragraph would have been far less wordy and quicker to the point. This is what Popova does in the last two sentences that have inspired a return to posting:

…but first, the necessary last two paragraphs of her essay, WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE:

“Here we are...you and me…
each of us  a trembling totality,
made of particles both absolutely vulnerable, and absolutely indestructible,
hungering for absolutes in a universe of relativity,
hungering for permanence in a universe of ceaseless change,
famished for meaning, for beauty, for emblems of existence.

Out of these hungers, out of these contradictions,
we make everything that invigorates life with aliveness:
our art and our music, our poems and our mathematics, our novels and our loves.“

I'm not particularly impressed with this impulsive doodle, but it was made in a burst of joy when I realized that the three, sometimes exhausting/often conflicting, elemental projects in my life were: Writing, Teaching, and PILAR.  Each of them a uniquely rewarding practice of ART...which "invigorates (my) life with aliveness..." 

The struggle I have been having for too long has been the attempt to decide which of these three loves has to go, to allow at least one of them to mature. I no longer feel the need to choose. I am blessed to have such a bounty of rewarding responsibilities to fill the rest of my dwindling days...it doesn't matter how proficient or acknowledged they become. The reward is in the daily doing.

I hope that by sharing this quote and these thoughts, others might re-evaluate and revitalize their daily lives, also.

"Hi Diane,
I recently came across this flier that I'd sent to my good friend Gordy, an artist in Santa Fe '93...my first Art Show with my 5'x3' tie dye paintings, and wrote:

  "My (13 mos older) Sister, Diane 22, made the flyer for me, with those audacious declarations!
  She was a Graphic Design Artist living in the "Art Heart" of San Francisco..."Haight-Ashbury"  Good times in the late  '60's Hippie Days. She was My inspiration....to be a professional Artist!
  She made a sign for a popular Restaurant on Haight Street with weathered 2x6x8 planks & the letters were raised nail heads...I was inspired....and vowed that I too, would make money with my Art!!!

Mostly, She inspired me,
because She was so confident & audacious!!"

All three of my younger sisters are artists of different mediums, and though I've been lax about adding Debra & Denise's work to the Co-Artist's tab, Donalie's sculptures are, along with her twin daughter's work.

This morning I read valuable advice from Nick Wignall's weekly newsletter and decided to add this blog post even if immediately on the heels of the previous one.  Why? Because I read his essay on being less self-critical and decided to bask in a bit of sisterly mutual admiration.

I had forgotten I'd created that poster for my sister's first art show but I remember her insistence that I participate in a group art show, which I did (my first and only; I'd stopped making etchings when we began building our boat, Pilar), but now cannot proudly post the one photograph of the event.

No matter. Here's the nail-sculpture sketch and finished project that Donalie referred to:

It is healing to be reminded of past accomplishments.

Fifteen years ago, I began this website for that very reason: my husband of thirty-four years had just died; I needed to see who I had been before there was a 'we' that was no longer. Eighteen months ago, my daughter died unexpectedly just before her fifty-third birthday. Grief and regrets, self-recriminations for the loss of a future together have dampened self-confidence...until now. 

THANK YOU, Donalie and Nick Wignal for the love and the great advice!

(0610 hrs) Thursday, May 11, 2023

“Forget your personal tragedy…”
—Ernest Hemingway—

“There’s no time for despair, no place for self-pity,
no need for silence, no room for fear.
We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal…”

“…A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—
must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely.
All that happens to us, including our misfortunes, our embarrassments,
all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
—Jorge Luis Borges—

(0625 hrs) Tuesday, May 16, 2023

"Forget your personal tragedies..."

...or your exhaustion, your doubts, the overload...the physical infirmities that make printing these words slow and awkward, sometimes painful...the weariness...confusion...

I WILL make a blog post today. I will use the quotes from last Thursday's journal entry on May 11th.

If I can keep myself from elaborating (adding the perfect photo for every line quoted) then I might be able to stop sabotaging myself by attempting too much perfection, for too many commitments.

Posting something, anything, will start the momentum for creating successive posts.

(0613 hrs) Saturday, May 20, 2023

It didn't happen. Again. No blog post.

(1700 hrs) Monday, May 22, 2023

I did compose this blog post--finally--last night, Sunday, May 21st.

I was happy. Gratified. Then forgot to save/copy/paste before sending. Lost it.

It felt like one more personal tragedy. Are the gods deliberately thwarting me? Are they telling me it was a bad post? Don't do it?

(1745 hrs) - have saved/copied and pasted this draft, elsewhere. Warts and all. Will now post...and begin another.

For the past eight weeks, I've been participating in an online course to learn what, if anything, can be done about Climate Change.  Last Monday was our final small group meeting on Zoom, which closed with one of the (short) video options ("For Your Delight") provided at the end of each week's module.

The course I participated in was Pachamama Alliance's 37th Game Changer Intensive. And, Yes, it was very intense, with masses of positive input for difficult issues beyond just the climate--but equal to the plethora of intellectual information, there was never neglect for thoughtful care of our emotional needs. Here's a moving example of support from Lynne Twist, Francis Moore Lappe, Rev. Deborah Johnson, and Joanna Macy, to those of us 'Going Forth' after this course:

The morning I watched this, stressed from not being able to keep up with that week's offerings and impending visitors absorbing afternoon study time, I somehow opened the #13 video when I was meant to watch another...suddenly I felt blessed to be watching and listening and comforted by being a part of this movement! Almost immediately the whole day changed. When my visitors arrived and echoed/embodied the message in this video; I was no longer alone with the responsibilities (I will post more specifics, soon).

In the meantime, here's another 'for your delight' video to make you smile while appreciating the insights:

If you want to learn what it actually takes to take effective action for a thriving, just, and sustainable world, take a look here to see what you think; the next course starts in June, and sign up by April 2nd at 11:59 PM PT.

If able, please comment or email to let me know your thoughts? It means a lot to me to hear feedback.

Two of my three New Year's resolutions were completed yesterday, with a follow-up email to Maria Popova this morning, thanking her for the inspiration of my BEING ALIVE project. 

The effort was arduous, not just for the learning curve while using Mac's Keynote software, but for the tug-o-war emotions of taking time away from 'more important' commitments. Time that loved ones have begrudged not given to them, instead.

There is a difference between the Must Do activities that absorb time, and the Need To Do efforts that must steal time to fulfill the needs of our heart... for being an artist...following faintly glimpsed faeries...hearing wispy notes of woodland music...writing...dancing...dreaming...Creating.

I'm not sure there's any logic to explain why the latter is so important to fulfill that when we choose it, it feels like locking the door against an equally-important self--but it does. For the past week, it has been thus with that gestating file of photos envisioned to illuminate my world within Popova's literary world of artistry.

It has been done, now. To the best of my ability. And, today, recognizing that the grey skies are not responsible for my uneasy ennui, that it has been the post-partum blues of an 'empty nest' (if you will forgive mixing the metaphors?) haunting me, I accepted the situation. The beloved, long-nurtured vision was no longer mine to tweak. Closure was needed, new focus, and new inspiration.

I found it here, in Rosie Spinks post and I hope others will, too: 

"This morning began so radiantly, now it is becoming a gray day; but first there was a shining as from a brand-new, never used year. And the night was a bright, distant one that seemed to rest above far more than just the earth"

A Visitation

 by Tahlia Hunter

Patience visited me
And it reminded me
That good things take time to come to fruition
And grow slowly with stability

Peace visited me
And it reminded me
That I may remain calm through the storms of life
Regardless of the chaos surrounding me

Hope visited me
And it reminded me
That better times lay ahead
And it would always be there to guide and uplift me

Humility visited me
And it reminded me
That I may achieve it
Not by trying to shrink myself and make myself less
But by focusing on serving the world and uplifting those around me

Kindness visited me
And it reminded me
To be more gentle, forgiving and compassionate toward myself
And those surrounding me

Confidence visited me
And it reminded me
To not conceal or suppress my gifts and talents
In order to make others feel more comfortable
But to embrace what makes me

Focus visited me
And it reminded me
That other people’s insecurities and judgments about me
Are not my problem
And I should redirect my attention
From others back to me

Freedom visited me
And it reminded me
That no one has control over my mindset, thoughts and wellbeing
But me

And love visited me
And it reminded me
That I need not search for it in others
As it lies within me.