MEMORIAL SERVICE & CELEBRATION OF LIFE - PEORIA

THANK YOU to everyone who helped make this day possible--bringing my tiny secret vision in my heart to life to honor Dan; the venues, flowers, music, food, av/tech, readings, photos, and everyone who attended both in person and virtually! And thank you the MOST to my sweet son who held my hand and comforted me all day.

 

Ecclesiastes 3

It is written:  For every thing there is a season, 

and a time for every matter under heaven:

A time to be born and a time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to reap;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to  build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to seek, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to throw away;

A time to tear, and a time to mend;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

A time for war, and a time for peace.

“I Go Among Trees” by Wendell Berry

I go among the trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
    around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
    where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
    and lives for a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
    and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
    and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
    mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
    and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

“Things” by Jane Kenyon (Also shared at our wedding in 2004)

The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound–
a small stone falling on a red leaf.

The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.

The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it and now she thrives….
Now is her time to thrive.

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.

In the Light

Kamini Roy

translated from the Bengali by Lilian M. Whitehouse        We are indeed children of Light. What an endless mart goes on in the Light. In the Light is our sleeping and waking, the play of our life and death.       Beneath one great canopy, in the ray of one great sun, slowly, very slowly, burn the unnumbered lamps of life.       In the midst of this unending Light I lose myself; amidst this intolerable radiance I wander like one blind.       We are indeed children of Light. Why then do we fear when we see the Light? Come, let us look all around and see, here no man hath cause for any fear.       In this boundless ocean of Light, if a tiny lamp goes out, let it go; who can say that it will not burn again?