Creativity, difficult times, Encouragement, Faith, Frank de Acosta, Inspiration, poetry

How Love Trumps Hate – A Poem and Photograph

glass flask, alchemy, chemistry
Glass flask, photo by Marissa Anderson, flickr.com

 

Alchemy is an ancient practice shrouded in mystery. Its practitioners sought to turn lead into gold through a purification process involving heat.

The word “transformation” is a synonym for alchemy. So is “magic” and “power,” both which can describe love.

Love, an emotion, is also a quality we all need more of during these difficult times in our society.

This poem demonstrates the power of love, which trumps hate.

 

Alchemy of Love (Love trumps Hate)

Never lose grace in faith
Believing there is beauty
To be found in everyone
All of us at one time
Have walked in brokenness
Through the dark corridors
Of our hearts and minds
An empathetic kindness
Compassion without condition
Received from another
Can be the spark that turns
A lost, dark, wounded soul
Towards the healing of light
Mending frayed, fragile lives
Prayers reaching to embrace
The stranger as relation
Engenders the true power of love
I say this with humble gratitude
Knowing I have received love
Undeserved; given love, unrequited
We are called to walk a sacred manner
Believing there is alchemy in love

Reflection by: Frank de Jesus Acosta

This photo made the rounds on Facebook. Eric Gaines, a police officer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, was standing at a bus stop on March 1 when a teenage boy stopped to pray over a homeless man. The officer snapped this photo.

Eighteen-year-old Stephen Watkins said he was on a bus home from school when a song he was listening to inspired him to get off at an earlier stop in order to bless a complete stranger.

“I prayed for him. I said, ‘God right now you’re using me to bless this man,’” Watkins told WJZ-TV. “Thank you for showing me this song.”

teenager, young man, praying, homeless man
Teenager Praying for a Homeless Man; photo from Facebook.

Life can be difficult, sometimes devoid of sense verging on hopelessness. Let’s chose compassion and love to make life a little better in our tiny part of the world. Maybe, just maybe, that gesture will travel and touch someone’s life like this poem and photograph did for me. Keep the faith.

Inspiration, poetry

Measuring the Days of Our Life – #Poetry

 

Tree of Life in Spring
Tree of Life-Photo by H. Koppdelany, flickr.com

 

For whatever reason, maybe the wind swaying the palm trees in my backyard or the patio chimes sounding, I felt wistful.

Maybe I felt like that because I finished a difficult scene in a novel I’m writing. It could be the stir of memories or the longing of wanting something which seems impossible to achieve.

Whatever the reason I came across this beautiful photo and had some thoughts about what the photographer might have been saying.

 

Thinking About Life

 

And the days pass like the leaves dropping from trees

tumbling one after another, every year,

faster than the one before.

 

Layers of memories, once vivid, fading into a blur.

 

We grow older, leave our past,

drift across the present and into our future.

Short shadows now cast long.

 

We look to the sky, knowing our view is measured.

 

How much of the blue do we see,  

as much as when we were young?

More now that we are not?

 

How we will miss that sky, 

scribbled with wafting clouds.

How we will miss the brilliance of a sun-splashed day.

 

The pages of our life keep turning,

nearing the end of a chapter,

nearer to the end of the story.

 

What do you see?