Living with Passion and Purpose

The almost daily downpours of rains subsided long ago here in Kansas, and I am left with only faint memories of our once lush landscape.

Nearly everything green has begun to give way to the typical hot dry weather wielding its force onto scorched patches of earth. The wind blows hard against all that dare to stand in its path as it races fast and furious along a route to parts unknown. And that brow beating sun has returned.

August...has arrived!

It is hard to find anyone out and about during the daylight hours, as the climate conditions seem a bit too harsh to linger out of doors for any length of time. Everyone is hibernating, like bears, inside the air conditioning with shades drawn, trying desperately to keep the heat out.

Tomorrow, I leave on an adventure to a place I have never been. It is a place with much harsher temperatures than we are experiencing here. Yet, I feel this well of excitement bubbling inside... knowing that I am traveling beyond my borders of the familiar and comfortable... to visit the unknown.

I go with a brave heart that is filled to the brim with passion and purpose.

This is how I always feel when I am getting ready to teach or vend. Knowing deep down to my very core that this is something I dearly love.

Drinking in these moments of being connected, savoring the opportunities to dip my toes in and wade around in the pool of kindred spirits that is constantly overflowing with creativity.

I always return from my trips exhausted with every bit of physical and mental energy spent, which is what happens when you thrust your whole self into something. But, I have never left without feeling as if my soul was nourished... and aching for just a little more.

Although happy to be home amidst the solitude, I often long to start again and re-live those blissful minutes and days of complete immersion in art and life.



I have been taking a break from Poetry Thursday over the last several weeks as I prepared for this journey. But, I must say that I have missed it sorely.

So, in my absence I would like to leave you with this...


upon these shores of cracked sinewy brown earth
shimmering gold waves lap and dance in rhythm
for the wind knows how to keep perfect time

soon there will be only a memory of what was
for harvest is nigh; then we will stand
in a sea of nothingness... remembering

how the swallows played among the amber furls
foraging for their evening supper
and the locusts would serenade a setting sun

this world bent and swaying to life's earnest demands
yields to the wanderlust of day to night to day
with the hither and yon of the seasons marching onward.