Amanda Gorman: The Hill We Climb"

"Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, 

When day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. 

And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. 

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. 

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. 

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. 

This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. 

Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s. So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. 

We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. 

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. 

When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it."

Amanda Gorman 

National Youth Poet Laureate

Inauguration of  President Joseph R. Biden

January 20, 2021

May Amanda Gorman's bright light shine forth across the hearts and souls of this great Nation and transform and lift us all to become highest and best selves 

Amanda Gorman reciting her poem at the Inauguration 

And for teachers/poetry study groups,, or lovers of poetry: 

Amanda Gorman | Lesson Plan | PBS NewsHour Extra

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting... from my heart and with my hands.

Sewing with Healing Thoughts of Love

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore's words from 1910 and his call for peace and freedom for his beloved India resonate in my heart and my own fervent belief in our need to call out for equality and freedom and a better life for all people in our own countries, nations and our much bigger world.

We must simply and complicatedly open our hearts to one another with love for all of man and animal kind and with the deepest of true sentient caring, compassion, and most of all, mercy.

We must direct our minds and our hearts through the energies of this love and compassion to envision, create, and bring forth into reality a new and better world.

The true world of sacred communion and all encompassing community that in our hearts, minds, and souls we all dream of within our deepest dreams within a dream that we call reality.

We strive to reach across uncertainties to our own basic truths and desires for a happy, healthy cohesive family, country, nation, and most of all world.

And that my dear friends is not always easy to do. This is the hardest lesson, learning and truth. And one that all of us, our countries,  nations and our entire world is and must learn to do to survived our many hardships and challenges.

And for me it's always starts with hope, faith, and charity--and always, always begins with love for family.   

And we all  have really good days filled with really good fun while still working towards our individual goals and desires with an immediate goal of being as happy and healthy and productive in living our days and weeks and months, and lives as we can.

And we have really challenging days, weeks, months or even years when things get harder and more challenging.

But our family is hanging in there,  celebrating the really good days of optimism and strength and inner faith that hope prevails and goodness and light lift us up over and over and over to keep up the good fight for health, healing and hope.

My daughter Terin's 2nd year of her ongoing cancer fund

New fundraiser has just started this month but still shows 2019 amount ending 8 months ago and no longer in the actual account. But we are so blessed by all donations past, present and going into the future. Thank you so very much!

Bless all of you who contributed. It helped her so much and meant more than you could ever imagine.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/terin039s-cancer-fund

Heart Filled Days

My Daughter's Cancer Diagnosis

2020

My daughter, Terin's 2nd year of battling breast cancer continues.  Donations incredibly appreciated with deepest gratitude.

https://gf.me/u/y7wp99

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting--"from my heart and with my hands."

Intersecting Art, Science, and the Mystical

 

I loved discovering that my art quilts header from my blog "With Heart and Hands" was featured on a site where its photo and an astronomy photo "Earthrise" taken by NASA Astronaut Bill Anders from Apollo 8 became a dual photo slide show of contrasted meaning and beauty.

Both photos were used to interchangably illustrate a Sunday Sermon that first appeared in a worldwide ministerial site that creates Sunday Sermons online. 

Discovering that my work was not only being featured on multiple websites online but discussed in Sunday Sermons all over America and even in other countries was a huge honor.

Especially when combined with a message about looking beyond the surface layer to see the double meaning where there is both physical and inward illumination.

They are the perfect photos for today's post on July 27's Blood Moon Eclipse, the longest Lunar Ecipse we will have this century and therefore the longest any of us will ever see.

Out of all the lunar activity we will ever feel or experience, July 27th's Blood Moon Eclipse is going to be one of the most intense.

Falling in the air sign of Aquarius, this total lunar eclipse is so strong that it’s going to pierce into the heart of our soul, in order to shift and transform our very beings.

Now,  more than ever before we are being asked to see and to feel the dual meaning of an inward and outward event with the potential for deep spiritual illumination.

Now more than ever spiritual warriors are needed to feel the light and love within them and radiate that love to the darkest corners of hearts and souls everywhere.

Still your hearts from anger, fear, or hatred. Fill them up with love and peace.  Our spirits know who we are, why we chose to be here during these incredibly challenging times.

Allow the power of both the seen and the unseen
to open your hearts to manifestating pure potentiality.

Become the change we need to be to manifest that illumination to pierce through the shadows of our own inner darkness to transform a very dark world with love and light.

 Lift up your hearts and souls to create a new and better world, one we all believe is possible and this world desperately needs to be.

Today, with my own full heart....

I will strive to see the peace

that is everywhere.

I will call in the abundance of

beauty and joy that lie in every moment.

I will strive to set aside everything I have learned

and presumed to know, in order to allow new

experiences to flood my being.

I will do everything in my power to clear my mind of

the negative energies that have confused my view

and distorted my words and actions.

I will create a new paradigm that helps me

to recognize only the good qualities in every

person, place, and thing that creates my environment

and the world I live in.

I will raise my energy and my light to the highest frequencies of

love, generosity, charity, compassion, forgiveness, and truth.

I will fill my head with constructive thoughts and images that will help me to grow inside and out.

I will fill my body with the nourishment it needs.

I will fill my heart with the beauty of all that is and ever will be.

I will fill my spirit with the divine energies that reach out and surround me.

I will love because I can

 give because I can

be gracious because I can

be humble because I have every reason to be

and speak from a place of love, joy, and gratitude.

I will practice random acts of kindness.

I will write a poem.

I will make art.

I will fill up my life with my heart's song.

I will volunteer to help loved ones, family, and friends.

I will reach out to my greater community, my nation, and the world.

I will recite my own personal affirmations or mantras.

I will laugh and forgive myself when I forget

that I made these promises at the beginning of my day.

And at the end of my day I will celebrate and congratulate

myself for what I have accomplished.

For as Helen Keller said "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched- they must be felt with the heart."

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting... from my heart and with my hands.

Bricolage: Snippets and Threadtales

Bricolage ( /ˌbriːkɵˈlɑːʒ/ or /ˌbrɪkɵˈlɑːʒ/) is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process.

The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler, the core meaning in French being, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)".

I am most definitely French, well almost half French, and I am most definitely a fiddler, tinker, and love to make creative and resourceful use of just about anything I find, am given, or come up with from the sum of any parts.

WITH HEART AND HANDS: LINKS: 2,500 3500 4500 OVER 5000

I started blogging in October of 2006. I felt a strong need to connect online with the creative community that had recently gone wild and was an incredible amount of fun as we all shared through blogging, quilting, crafting, sewing, and making art of all kinds.

WITH HEART AND HANDS: FREE QUILT BLOCK PATTERNS

It was a vibrant period in the blogging and community quilting worlds and the friendships that immediately sprung up were such a gift and such a blessing.

MAKING FIDGET QUILTS, APRONS, PILLOWS, BAGS FOR ALZHEIMER'S PATIENTS: FREE TUTORIALS AND IDEAS 2015

Bit by bit over the past decade, blogging has changed a lot! Many have left and moved on to fame and fortune, others to facebook and instagram. And many like myself do their best to keep up with all of the many changes.

We've moved on to new ways and forms of quilting ..maybe art quilting, maybe modern, perhaps liberated quilting or making new things in different ways with some of the same old pieces but for a new purpose in our lives...

ANGEL WRAPS AND PREEMIE PATTERNS

HOW TO MAKE A QUILLOW (AND FOLD IT BACK INTO A PILLOW!)

I continue to sew together all of the varied pieces of my life. To still do all of the things that my family and I love to do.

For home

and family, in both Oregon and Alaska,

So yes, I am busy in a lot of diverse and mentally, physically, and even creatively spiritual ways!

Spending time with loved ones, my husband, three grown kids and their partners, my beloved grandbabies and pets and all of our families and extended family.

Getting together with my grown children and their partners, spending as much time as I am able to with my three precious and greatly loved grandchildren, doing all of the spiritually meaningful care giving and all of the charitable quilting, blanket making, and helping others that is my true nature in life.

Bits and pieces of our lives, no matter how simple or how complex all stitched together with love.

So, if you don't see me here -

or piling up my projects here-

or here

or even here.

or oh yes, here - 

It's because I am here/there/and everywhere - in my real "dreamtime" of life and maybe not in this virtual one. I will still be doing the things that mean the very most and make the biggest difference in my life, and the lives of those I love!

We all need to dim the lights a bit, practice our deep breathing, calm the pace of our lives, go within to the core, the center, the calming focus of our lives.

We access that inner flow, enter the presence of peace and harmony. in the simplest of ways, with the simplest of things, yet continue to manifest the creative impulse,

and share, support, and communicate with others as I do - 

with love,
and with my heart and hands.

Michele

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting... from my heart and with my hands.