What are the words you reach for?
An invitation.
Hello there! And welcome to Dandelion Seeds, an illustrated newsletter in search of the magic in everyday moments.
Last week, I loved sharing one of my favorite blessings from John O’Donohue with you: “For One Who Is Exhausted.”
And as I hand-lettered his blessing, I found myself wondering about the words you turn to, when you’re in need of a little strength or support.
Are they from Rilke or Rumi or the late, great Mary Oliver?
But not only turn to — the question I really kept thinking about was, what are the words you reach for? As though, when we’re feeling far from ourselves, we can almost viscerally reach out across the space between who we are today and who we long to be again, and there are words to help us begin that journey home.
And so today, I’d love to invite you to share one of your own favorite poems or quotes, by leaving a comment this week:
What are the words you reach for?
I’ll then hand-letter your responses (no doubt with a few new illustrations to accompany them) and share them here soon, as a new community edition of Dandelion Seeds.
It’ll be our fourth such creative collaboration so far — written by you, illustrated and hand-lettered by me — and I can’t wait to see it come to life.
With love,
Candace
Wendell Berry’s ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ always helps me:
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
To my harshest critic, me:
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
- Mary Oliver