I’m with Brian Doyle’s closing words in his essay, Silence: “heart naked as a baby”.
It’s so visual, the baby wet and naked in the bath, the heart equally wet, moist, exposed. I pause, look at my grandson’s baby pictures, a video of him lying on his back waving arms and legs, gurgling at the ceiling fan twirling above, breath, an extravagance rippling through his torso.
Wonder wanders. Can my heart be “naked as a baby”, breath connecting the years?
Today I was at Book Passage attending a reading by Lee Klinger Lesser. She read from her book Return to Our Senses: A Path to Stability in an Unstable World. To begin, Lee led us in grounding on our chairs and feeling the support of the earth. She led us to make a fist and feel how we were affected, and to notice how a fist of anger affects us. Also, notice how a different fist, a softer meeting, can lead us to a resilience that meets the challenges of these days. Lee discussed her work with Veterans PATH, PATH standing for Peace, Acceptance, Transformation, and Honor. Lee has changed lives with this program, healed the wounds that come with war.
She leads retreats with wildlife fighters, helping them to deal with pain, loss, and death. She spoke of Jarvis Masters, a wonderful man and how he’s transformed his unjust path on Death Row to teach and lead with speaking and his books. I could go on and on about the open heart that is Lee, and the works she does, but I’ll just say to buy her book and feel hope for opening your heart to bring forth your part in changing yourself, and in that, the world.
I’m reading Brian Doyle’s essays in his book, One Long River of Song. I come to this, an exchange with his sister who is a nun and lives in a monastery. He asks his sister questions about silence.
What did you do when you were silent?
I listened, she says. I listened really hard.
Did you make any noise at all?
Sometimes I found myself humming, she says, but it wasn’t any music I’d known before. Which is pretty interesting. Where does music come from that you never heard before?
Good question, I say.
And I found, she says, that it is relatively easy not to talk to other people, but much harder not to talk to animals. Isn’t that odd? Why would that be?
Another good question, I say.
I finished reading Mink River by Brian Doyle, a book I love. Needing a little more of his voice, I came to a book of his poems How the Light Gets In: And Other Headlong Epiphanies. Here’s one, a soft note for the night.
What is the best poem you ever wrote in your
whole life?
I ask a friend of mine, aged six, and she thinks
about this
For a whole minute, looking down in the grass for
words,
And she says, The time I tried to make a coat for a
mouse
From spider-webs. My sister and brothers helped
me find
The webs. It takes a lot of webs to make a jacket
for mice.
We apologized to the spiders. This was in October.
Mama
Said we could borrow webs as long as we were
respectful.
That’s the best poem I ever wrote, and I didn’t do
it alone.
I know that those who read this blog are politically astute, but in case you missed Nicholas Kristoff today, I’ve copied the link to gift it. There’s many reasons to despair about our country’s decline, but I think Nicholas Kristof is graphically and tragically clear in what’s happening. Both political parties have responsibility though one clearly dominates the abuse. I’m happy to pay taxes to support those who need help, but that’s not what’s happening. It has to stop and reverse before we have a revolution like the French and I doubt any of us will benefit from that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/opinion/poverty-america-oklahoma.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2FA.sA-h.AybYGzwZ2Qpy&smid=url-share
I’m reminiscing on my six year old grandson’s attention to detail at his nature camp. He had been nervous as he was going to a camp where he didn’t know anyone. I know the feeling but then we saw deer as we drove in, male and female deer, and that was the beginning to an inclusive letting down.
The children were directed to a picnic table where “tree cookies” were laid out, rounds of tree trunk, and there were bins of colored pens so each child could make their own nametag. He carefully wrote his name on his tree circle, and I thought that was it. I handed him a green string to put through the hole of the tag, but he wasn’t finished. He then outlined the three letters in another color, and then, another and meanwhile I’m thinking he’s done, and we’re moving along, but then he carefully colored the whole round in, and I thought of how I might have done it. I might have just written the letters – no elaboration or gift of time and flow. He put the string through and tied it himself in a double knot though other children went to the counselor to have it done.
I’m still with the experience as I come to Ellen Glasgow’s words: “Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I had felt at twenty.”
I may not have the energy or agility of the age of twenty, but there’s such a beautiful continuing way of learning. My grandson is my teacher. I’m older than sixty, and yet here I am expanding my age rings that may one day be cut into cookies, in which children write their names.
When I picked him up from camp, the nametag was turned around, with the word “LEF” on it. They had played a game where he became a leaf. I wondered if it was worth mentioning that “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking”, but then, I realized it doesn’t matter. He was thrilled to be a leaf, a nurturer. He shared that other children were a slug, or a bug, but as a leaf he provides food and beauty. We were careful on the way home to not step on any leaves, an almost impossible task where they live, and yet, my heart is tender in reflection, in caring for the ground on which we walk, and what’s underneath.
As I gather age rings like the trunk of a tree, I feel myself expanding into widening rings of youth. I branch and leaf. I’m free. And the children’s song from Marlo Thomas and Friends comes to me: Free to Be …. You and Me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCUGMMEF2Zk
Years ago, my family took a tour at Abbot’s Lagoon with Megan Isadore, who co-founded the River Otter Ecology Project, to learn about and see the river otters that live and thrive there. This time of year you can see the new babies. Today there’s an article on a new behavior. The otters are augmenting their diet with pelicans. Researchers are wondering how the pelican’s capture and eating behavior spread from Rodeo Lagoon in the Marin Headlands to Abbott’s Lagoon in Point Reyes, a distance of fifty miles.
I’m reminded of Sutro Sam. In late 2012 and early 2013, Sutro Sam showed up in a protected freshwater-fed pool within the ruins of Sutro Baths in San Francisco. River otters hadn’t been seen in San Francisco in decades but there was Sutro Sam frolicing in glee because the ruins were stocked with large pet goldfish released by locals. Because he had a tracker, they knew he swam across the bay from Marin.
Recently I learned of mice who were caught in Nicasio and released near a Mill Valley creek. They found their way back to Nicasio. The proof was on their tails that had been spray-painted pink.
When I read the article, I thought perhaps the information had spread through some special otter news network, but remembering Sutro Sam, I thought of Louis and Clark, and adventurers like George Mallory who wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it is there”. Sir Edmund Hillary said, “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves”. Otters, like humans, are curious animals, and they’re showing us they, too, like to explore.
Or maybe it is a certain individual, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or one who links to the Australian Aboriginal rite of passage where a young one goes out alone on a Walkabout, a spiritual journey to become an adult.
Here’s the article: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/otters-pelicans-point-reyes-22361117.php
Yesterday I took my grandson to a nature camp at Filoli. We saw deer as we drove in. The children began by making name tags from “tree cookies”, circles of a tree trunk, and then, went onto games to learn their nature name, and traveled down to and along the creek. I ate lunch at the cafe and spent time in the gardens.
I’m slowly reading Joan Chittister’s book The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully.
And, of course, this can apply to any of us at any age. There’s always someone to mentor.
Chittister:
Now, too, we have a responsibility to mentor the generations after us in the values and ideals that built a society based on equality, respect for others, and pluralism. More than that, we have the spiritual responsibility to see life as a moral force rather than simply a private enterprise.
We need to come to understand to the center of our souls that age is not a disease. It is a new experience in how to live life, how to milk it dry of goodness, of energy, of gratitude, of calm and quiet creativity.
The burden of a lack of commitment to accomplishment means that we have moved into a period of suspended animation, that aging is nothing more than deterioration. The truth is that aging means aging. Nothing more, nothing less. It is just us grown ripe.
The blessing of a commitment to accomplishment is that, as we continue to bring out considerable skills, experience, and insight to bear on the present needs of humankind, we will certainly become wiser, definitely spiritually stronger, and more than ever a blessing to the rest of society.
Emily Dickinson wrote: We turn not older with years, but newer every day.
I’m sorry to keep quoting from Heather Cox Richardson but her words again today disturb as she reveals more of this administration’s corruption. I offer the beginning and last paragraph of what she says today.
It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. As Philip Kennicott reported in the Washington Post yesterday, more than two dozen experts have sued to stop the plan, saying paint could irreversibly damage the stone and would be a “taxpayers’ nightmare” as the building would have to be repaired and repainted regularly.
But on Monday, deputy assistant to the president Heather Martin filed a declaration saying the White House Office of Administration was beginning preparations for the paint job. As Kennicott points out, the administration is using the case to give the president the ability to “erase the nation’s physical culture, its man-made, natural and cultural wonders.”
The administration is arguing that the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that normally handles maintenance of federal buildings, has ceded control of the building to the White House Office of Administration. The GSA follows the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, laws that require extensive reviews and input from experts and the public.
Those laws do not apply to the White House Office of Administration. Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, one of the organizations that sued to stop Trump from painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, told Kennicott: “The precedent is potentially devastating. Anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project, he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review and put it in his own shop.” That change would not be limited to buildings, Kennicott explains. It could be used, for example, to rush a pipeline through pristine wilderness.
A White House official told Kennicott that the White House conducts necessary reviews and that taking over for the GSA allows the White House “to more efficiently and economically manage the project.”
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would like a word.
She goes on and ends with this: What is at stake is more than just buildings. It is the whitewashing and bulldozing of our history and culture, created over centuries by the many people who have built the United States, in service to the small vision of Trump and his enablers.
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