Happy Valentine’s Day!
“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”
– Charles Dickens –
Nurture peace, cultivate kindness, and carry the calm.
Nature of the week:
Shadow of the Week:
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Text and photos © 2021 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.
“Hatred paralyzes life;
Love releases it.
Hatred confuses life.
Love harmonizes it.
Hatred darkens life;
Love illuminates it.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope –
Nurture peace, cultivate kindness, and carry the calm.
Nature of the week:
Shadow of the Week – shamrocks and Dala horse:
If you want me to send these thoughts to your email each Sunday, simply sign up on the right.
Text and photos © 2021 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.
Happy New Year!
“Give us grace and strength to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends and soften to us our enemies. Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death loyal and loving to one another.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
Nurture peace, cultivate kindness, and carry the calm.
Nature of the week:
Shadow of the Week—a rope fence at the zoo:
If you want me to send these thoughts to your email each Sunday, simply sign up on the right.
Text and photos © 2021 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.
“Kindness eases change.
Love quiets fear.”
– Octavia F. Butler, Parable of the Talents –
Nurture peace. Cultivate kindness. Carry the calm.
Just to clarify, I’m not talking about the peace of ignorance or the kindness of platitudes or the calmness of inaction. I’m talking about a reservoir of inner peace, kindness, and calm that strengthens, balances, and guides our thoughts, our words, our actions.
Nature of the week:
Shadow of the Week:
If you want me to send these thoughts to your email each Sunday, simply sign up on the right.
Text and photos © 2020 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.
“For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.”
– William Blake –
May mercy overflow your heart,
may compassion wear your face,
may love take your form.
May you be clothed in peace.
Nurture peace. Cultivate kindness. Carry the calm.
Nature of the week:
Shadow of the Week:
If you want me to send these thoughts to your email each Sunday, simply sign up on the right.
Text and photos © 2019 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.
“He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast,
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small.”
Nurture peace, cultivate kindness, and carry the calm.
Nature of the week:
Shadow of the Week:
If you want me to send these thoughts to your email each Sunday, simply sign up on the right.
Text and photos © 2019 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.
“From form to form, beauty to beauty,
ever changing, never resting,
all (in nature) are speeding on
with love’s enthusiasm,
singing with the stars the eternal song of creation.”
– John Muir –
Nurture peace, cultivate kindness, and carry the calm.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Nature of the week:
Shadow of the Week:
If you want me to send these thoughts to your email each Sunday, simply sign up on the right.
Text and photos © 2019 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.
“Those who don’t feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don’t drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
Those who don’t want to change,
Let them sleep.”
– Rumi –
Peace is waiting for you – and joy and wonder and goodness and grace. And Love. Don’t sleep.
Nurture peace, cultivate kindness, and carry the calm.
Nature of the week:
Shadow of the Week:
If you want me to send these thoughts to your email each Sunday, simply sign up on the right.
For my longer posts on the art of noticing, link here.
Text and photos © 2018 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.
“The wind howls, but the mountain remains still.”
– Japanese proverb –
Be mountain strong. Keep standing for love and kindness and peace even as the winds of the world howl.
Nurture peace, cultivate kindness, and carry the calm.
Nature of the week – at Cheekwood Botanical Gardens:
Shadow of the Week:
If you want me to send these thoughts to your email each Sunday, simply sign up on the right.
For my posts on the wonder of life, link here.
Text and photos © 2018 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.
What can be divided endlessly and still not diminish?
That secret is not so hard to guess, but there’s another secret that Valentine’s Day will keep forever: how it began.
Some say that Valentine’s Day began with two saints in the early Christian church, both named Valentine, both said to have been martyred on February 14. One was a priest who secretly married couples after the Roman Emperor Claudius commanded that young men not marry (because single men were supposedly better soldiers). Another was a Christian jailed for not worshiping Roman gods. Children loved him so much that they tossed notes through his barred window. Since the Old French word galantine, meaning gallant or lover, sounded like Valentine, some say that people equated one or both of the St. Valentines with galantine and began to celebrate lovers on that day.
Other people say that Chaucer began the Valentine tradition when he wrote that birds started pairing off on February 14. (At that time, the calendar was different from the one we have now; their 14th was our 24th, which is closer to spring in the Northern Hemisphere.) So the day was celebrated as a time when couples got together.
It seems that Valentine’s Day will keep its beginnings a secret. But love’s best secret?
“Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.”
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh –
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Nurture peace, cultivate loving kindness, and carry the calm.
Nature of the week :
Shadow of the Week:
If you want me to send these thoughts to your email each Sunday, simply sign up on the right.
For my posts on life and the wonder of it all, link here.
Text and photos © 2018 Karyn Henley. All rights reserved.