Another Year Around the Sun

We made it! Another year.

Love your extraordinary work.

Thank you for the gift you gave each other, and me.

You continue to make this a community – a community where we are plunged into a place full of color, music, and conversation.  You played your part to keep Boston, Boston University, and this environment as a place for people to come together, find passion, write poetry, re-invent themselves, refresh, start to make their way, and find love.

As we start another 365 around that magnificent star, I offer you my sincere thanks.

I also offer inspiration as my gift. Here is a meditation that I often read as a way to start my day.  Perhaps you’ll find the inspiration I often catch when I read this piece (reading this is best when coupled with Esperanza Spalding’s “Perazuán” as a hum for your setting):

“How good it is to center down!” From Howard Thurman’s “Meditations of the Heart”

How good it is to center down!

To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!

The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;

Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,

While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.

With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes, a fresh sense of order in our living;

A direction, a strong sure purpose that will structure our confusion and bring meaning in our chaos.

We look at ourselves in this waiting moment — the kinds of people we are.

The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives? — what are the motives that order our days?

What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go?

Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused?

For what end do we make sacrifices? Where is my treasure and what do I love most in life?

What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?

Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.

As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind —

A deeper not which only the stillness of the heart makes clear.

It moves directly to the core of our being. Our questions are answered,

With the peace of the Eternal in our step.

How good it is to center down!

I appreciate you.  Many thanks for how you bring it every day.  All the best to you and to the people you love.

Peace.