Great day at Gaithersburg Book Festival! Looking forward to savoring these fabulous poetry books I purchased today.

So glad to meet you today and excited to check out your new collection!

Thanks for posting this!🌻

Resurrection

Can people change?

Within the darkness
of an unfurled bud
lies the answer.

The burgeoning sun
over the horizon
says much the same.

And this Easter morn
I look in the mirror
and ask myself

what will I allow to die
in order that someone new
will rise again.
PMMLevitt

Be sure to check out my new poems and those of other MD writers in January 2025 Pen in Hand by Maryland Writer's Association!

Pen in Hand journal cover depicting a red door and deadbolt. Text says Pen in Hand Literary Journal January 2025 and Maryland Writer's Association.

Table of contents

Look what arrived today!

Watercolor blue flowers on a handcrafted bookmark with calligraphy reading Breathe printed upon it accompanies by a note giving the bookmark to whomever finds it.

Found in a book on breast cancer in the library. Don't discount the little gestures of love. Every choice to love matters.

Three Poems by Pamela Mathison-Levitt | Mid-Atlantic Review

Three poems on Mid-Atlantic Review today!

midatlanticreview.com/2025/02/thre...

WARNING to NIH employees:

The new intranet site set up with transition info can track you accessing it.

There have been a lot of leaks of emails recently, which may be harder to use to identify leakers. Please be very careful leaking info from that intranet site. 1/

📣 Federal workers 📣

Make sure you log into the eOPF system to download copies of your official employment records and store them in a safe location.

Important records include: SF-50, SF-52, offer letters, past performance evaluations, financial disclosure forms, etc.

The entire archive of CDC datasets can be found here.

HUGE shoutout to data archivists- this work is important 👏🙌🏻

archive.org/details/2025...

Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Board game boxes, one red, white and blue reading Constitution Quest. One light yellow marked Civitas.

Two learning games we've been playing are Civitas and Constitution Quest. Civitas is similar to Uno and teaches forms of government while Constitution Quest (available in the Natl. Archives' gift shop) reviews knowledge of the Constitution.

#Civics
#Constitution
#civicseducation

"Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these, thy messengers of fellowship and love..."-Norbert Fabian Capek

Borage blooms along the path
camouflaged by blue skies,
abiding planes plucking
stars from one to another time,

signs, amidst the darkness
to take courage where we find
it along the edges, plucking
it up to press into each other's minds.

PMMLevitt

Messengers of Fellowship and Love

Norbert found the blossom
within the walls of Dachau,
his fingers, plucking,
a reed thin stem reaching out.

Inside: the strongest protest.
A soft petal passed, allied
their fingers, plucking
beauty from the bleak tide.

This poem is a flower for you.

Norbert Fabian Capek was a Unitarian minister tortured and killed at Dachau. He started the Unitarian Universalist tradition of the flower communion where flowers are exchanged as a symbol of what we offer to each other in community and fellowship. He continued this practice while at Dachau.

Do what is in your control to add grains of love, peace, justice, kindness.

In graduate school, I wrote an essay on choice which stuck with me. What I learned is that no matter how constrained our choices, we always have them. We have the choice to love, to live from our integrity, to seek connection, to heal. Every action is a grain of sand on the scales of justice.

We live in illusion because the nervous system craves safety and so we seek control to support it and avoid feelings of helplessness. Sometimes this means we adapt to survive what we may not be able to control.

Today, I am thinking about choice and control.

When we are at peace, healthy, and safe, our subconscious keeps from our awareness that only a lift of a veil away is violence, illness, poverty.