• Home
  • About
  • Books
  • Events
  • Photo Gallery
  • Blog
  • Contact

A Joyful Noise

Rituals and Routines

Happy New Year 2020

January 1, 2020 by Melodye Shore

We meditated by the water’s edge, saying goodbye to 2019 and inviting goodness and light into the New Year.

We wrote our intentions in the sand with driftwood and allowed the incoming waves to wash them out to sea. 

Three close friends, basking in the sunshine and enjoying each other’s company.

Two small girls walked past, holding their young mother’s hands. They glanced back at us, watching our every move.

The littlest one caught my gaze. I smiled and then added a rose from my garden to the words I’d etched in the sand.

She grinned, grabbed a stick of her own, and lifted it overhead. An unspoken gesture of solidarity among kindreds.

When we left the beach a while later, she was writing her own story into the sand.

Singular events, brimming with joy and sprinkled with magic. This is what we live for. And if we’re lucky enough, we have friends and loved ones with whom to share them.

Happy New Year, everybody! Wishing you every goodness in the now, and every good thing on the horizon.

Posted in: 2020, beach, Christmas Memories, Laguna Beach, memories, New Year's Eve, Rituals and Routines, writing Tagged: 2020, beach, friends, girl, laguna beach, magic wand, magical moments, new year's, new year's eve, sand

Art Challenge of the Month: Rituals and Routines

March 18, 2017 by Melodye Shore

Mindful 

(a poem from Mary Oliver’s collection, Why I Wake Early)

 

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

This is my contribution to the Art Challenge of the Month, Rituals and Routines. Want to join us? The rules are simple: “Draw, paint, photo shoot, embroider, install, write, muse …. any discipline is welcome. Over the weekend of March 18-19, come and announce here that you have posted.”

Posted in: art challenge, Mary Oliver, Mindful, Rituals and Routines, Why I wake early Tagged: art challenge, cairns, flowers, hummingbirds, mary oliver, nests, seals

Topics

ab 2165 beach billy graham birds can i get a witness christmas dear bully family archives flowers freckles garden gardening harbor seals hope hummingbird hummingbird hatchlings hummingbird nest 2015 hummingbirds jeannine atkins joy joyful noise laguna beach land of medicine buddha memoir memoir writing monarch butterfly nana nancy drew new year's eve ocean orange county peace photography poetry rosa resolution rose sara seals tent revival thankful thursday thanksgiving the author's tent throwback thursday wordless wednesday writing

Recent Posts

  • My uncouth neighbors: A murder of crows
  • Smitten with Kittens, by Florence and Wendell Minor
  • Happy Valentine’s Day!
  • Happy New Year, 2022
  • The Badlands
  • TINY BIRD: A Hummingbird’s Amazing Journey
  • The welcome respite of rain

Archives

Copyright © 2023 .

Omega WordPress Theme by ThemeHall