Jenna Lee Smith

Today is my youngest granddaughter’s fifteenth birthday. Jenna Lee Smith is a delight. She is beautiful, precocious, fun and funny. I think fifteen is a tipping point for all of us. It is a time when adult awareness coats every decision, every infatuation and every heartache. It’s a time when bodies are trim and thin and in many ways approaching their peek of youthful expression. Bodies will change a little over the next few years, but for the most part, what you are at fifteen you will be at twenty-five.

The next ten years will be filled with sophisticated choices and complex learning. Discernment will become the denominator of adult decisions and the heart will be more involved with your mind than you ever thought possible. In fact, you will see them as two distinct powers within your being. Their dichotomy will often conflict and the choices will be either hard, stubborn or easy.

There is a truth my dear Jenna Lee that I believe and follow. If you follow your heart you will always be happy. You may not be rich; you may not be successful in the false way society sees success, but you will be happy. That is my wish for you today on your fifteenth birthday.

A Sonnet

This is one of my favorite Sonnets.

Universal Thought

© 2007 Rolland G. Smith

Would that we could see far beyond the eye

To where the mind oft goes to be alone.

Where mystery blends with thoughts that never die

And magic melts the ice of what’s unknown.

The miracle of mind is what’s not seen

Except when artist’s hands can clearly show

The Universe and time set in-between

The silence and the thought; a vast tableau.

What greater gift is there, but to create

And greet imagination at its core.

It is in bringing forth that we await

The opening of wonder at the door.

The mind is just the hook to hold the thought

Before we let it go and what it’s wrought.

Shadows and Stars

Shadows and Stars

© 2011 Rolland G. Smith

Behold the beauty sown in light

To bright the way to inner bliss

Upon the canvas of the night.

Before the darkness goodnight kiss.

The naked trees of winter time

Pay homage in their silent prayer

To All That Is as Source sublime.

Their gowns of green no longer there.

We often ask to see the love

Of something greater than the mind.

A pristine sky and stars above

Are answers when the two combine.

An Evening by the Fire

I was thinking earlier last evening as I lit a fire in the fireplace and watched the flames expand through the dry wood of my savings that the Oaks, Maples, and Ash burn beautifully. The few logs of pulp wood that I have cut down burn like damp leaves.

It’s been a late November cold where I live and tomorrow begins December. I border the  Shawangunks and Catskill mountain ranges and I’m nestled in a valley a little higher than the Hudson valley so my area gets an up-slope frost and a biting chill when Canada sends us a north wind clipper.

And so I lite a fire. Fireplace fires always remind me of life. The flames are the youth of being, the coals are brightness and heat of middle age and the embers are the waning lights of age and memory.

Simplistic, of course, but an encouragement that wherever you see the light, in youth, middle age or in old age, there is joy and the still small spark of creation. I love it.

If you look at the wood before you put it into the chewing cauldron of fire, you have a log of light and form from many years of growth. Stored in the cellulous fibers are the heat of the sun, the substances of form from soil nutrients and the nourishment of water. A gift of nature to humankind for use as sustenance, structure and stored heat.

As I write this post my fire is nearly out. A few sparks glow deep within the covering ash. Age is a lot like that. It’s not sad. It’s a reality check to create while you can before your thoughts a hundred years from now are no more than the dissipating smoke of a memory.