Ivan Granger posted this hopeful youtube offering at Poetry Chaikhana earlier this week. Don Alverto Taxo, a Quichua elder and Iachak (community leader/healer) from Equador,  invites us all to trust the universal human intuition to bring greater harmony into our lives, and to seek after life’s deeper meaning.  I appreciate his message, but also  love the music in the background; the children playing; the sheep; the gorgeous green landscape. This is visually beautiful and spiritually uplifting.

The beautiful innocence of the children in the video made me think of this poem.

in my village

holiness was everywhere

like oxygen like breath

it sparked and it hummed

birdsong in the trees

we children carried our joy

down the long road to the schoolhouse

all day it grew inside us

big like hungry flowers

when evening arrived like a blanket

we danced in the dark by our lights

while our parents talking and cooking

laughing rang the bell

giving thanks around the table

we’d pause for eternal half-fullness

breaking bread and stealing kisses

between sips of sweet autumn wine

and sometimes it rained in my village

and we opened the windows to listen

to the fertile music sound of it

telling stories by the fire

then marveling at the splendid

sheer distance of the starlight

we’d ask for vivid dreams

to bless us in our beds

in my village my village
in my village…

~Ingrid Goff-Maidoff

from What Holds Us, New and Selected Poems

Tags: joyful living, poetry by Ingrid Goff-Maidoff