Reaching Out with Light and Joy

There is only a single, urgent task: to attach oneself someplace to nature, to that which is strong, striving and bright with unreserved readiness, and then to move forward in one’s efforts without any calculation or guile, even when engaged in the most trivial and mundane activities.

Each time we thus reach out with joy, each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but alter the past within us, weave it into the pattern of our existence, and dissolve the foreign body whose exact composition we ultimately do not know.”


Rainer Marie Rilke
Letters on Life page 7

Our sunflowers come up year after year. Thriving and reseeding with very limited attention or care. They give me great hope in perseverance,  hope, and survival in spite of all challenges.  I choose hope, joy and finding beauty all around me.

With a deep faith and sustaining belief that all sentient beings are connected to, and with nature, I feel all of us interconnected. If sunflowers can grow with such abundance and exhuberance of spirit then so can we all. 

We have survived losses that hurt us to the core of our being. We have all faced fear and anxiety and managed to keep going anyway. We have all been so exhausted, so tired of fighting through sickness or disease or pain. 

We are still here. We are still fighting. Deep inside we know we are here for a reason. We keep waiting to figure out what our life purpose is. All the while we are already doing it, already learning bit by bit, day by day. 

We are all hanging in there. Trying our best. 

I'm at week 6 of my "Great Attic/Garage Clean out of 2020". Oh the stuff that I saved ! I boggle my own mind. But what an adventure reliving my youth, high school and college adventures! Getting married, having children, all the birthdays and Christmases and fun of making, buying, and always the giving! 

I am filled with gratitude to still be here. To still have so much joy and love.

🌛💚🌜

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands sharing an imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting "from my heart and with my hands".