This is What You Shall Do

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

An Olive Aside: Have you read Leaves of Grass? I am just delving into its rich celebration of life. (Perhaps too much of a celebration for its nineteenth-century readers, who balked at its language of the body and sexual love). It's readily available online, so you have no excuse not to at least take a glance.


Happy weekending!

Images found here.

An Autumn Return

Dear Ones,

Some people choose spring as the season of rebirth and rejuvenation; Olive prefers autumn. To grow again under the soft, protective foliage of new fallen leaves after the harsh exposure of summer is a temptation Olive cannot, and won't, resist.

How can it be nearly a year since I have posted! Olive has never been very keen on odd-numbered years, and 2011 was not keen on her. Like stomping out the year, crunching the leaves beneath my feet is going to be a satisfying activity this fall, a healing one at that. New things grow from this sort of composting, don't they? That is a heart-warming, and inspiring thought!

All this sounds melancholy, and just a little fierce for someone so diminutive. It's not meant to be. Life has taken on a wonderfully coloured hue of late, and it's time to share the creative whispers that scuttle around Olive's head at night, begging to be set free.

I hope you have not forgotten me, for I have most definitely not forgotten you! Quietness does not equal absence: I have been lurking around all your blogs, even if the comment button has become rusty.

The rain has just stopped, and there is brightness to the south. It's time to go outside for a moment, if only to invite you all back in. Will you join me this September for lots of adventures on Olive Writes?  Where shall we go, and what shall we do? Do tell!

The tea is always on,
Olive

Image found here.