Cathy's Blog!

Posted on July 29, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

“Tree Cookies”

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

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Explorers

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

River otters on the sand dunes at Abbott’s Lagoon Another otter may also be in the water.

Otters swimming under the bridge at Abbott’s Lagoon

Posted on July 28, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Filoli Gardens

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.

Red dragonfly to the right of the flower and another down to the right

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Ripening

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.

Posted on July 26, 2026July 26, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Destruction

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.

Here’s Ginger, a happy dog, unaware of it all!

Posted on July 24, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

The Cost of War

From Heather Cox Richardson today:

In mid-April 1953, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man who knew and led a war said:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

These numbers are from 1953. Imagine what we’re spending would buy now. Meanwhile in this administration led by those who did not serve, “While Hegseth told Congress the war has cost $37.5 billion so far, Gordon Lubold, Mosheh Gains, and Courtney Kube of NBC News reported on July 14 that the internal Pentagon estimate of the cost is about $100 billion. Walker notes that when economists at Moody’s added higher gas prices to the cost of the war, they estimated that it has cost U.S. households about $1,100 each.

And that’s just the financial cost. It doesn’t count those who are killed and wounded on “both” sides, and how that affects their families and friends. It boggles the mind.

Posted on July 23, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Luminous

My book group has chosen that we each read a book on aging for the next meeting. A list came out and I remember reading Joan Chittister’s book The Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully.

I return to it now, many years later, when it has greater immediacy.

She quotes Meridel Le Sueur, “I am luminous with age.” Miridel Le Sueur lived to be ninety-six. I’m with how illuminating living with those words can be. I went to sleep with “I am luminous with age”, and woke this morning reverberating like a bell as the words rang through.

In the book, Chittister writes of how aging in this society is not currently respected, and yet, here we are, many of us with decades of knowledge, learning, testing, receiving, learning to have compassion for ourselves as we muddle through and learn to trust the guidance within as we reach out for meaningful conversations with family and friends. We flail and fail and rise again.

Chittister says aging is about transformation, transformation not so much in the way we look to other people, but in the way we look at life. “Age is the moment we come to terms with ourselves. We begin to look inside ourselves. We begin to find more strength in the spirit than in the flesh.”

A friend spoke of hearing her neighbor in her room at a skilled nursing facility crying in the night. I think of tears, the cleansing of tears. Each of us contains this mixture of love and fear, laughter and tears, this movement and vibration constantly showing us and giving us life as we are here. We are luminous with each moment, each day, when we allow ourselves to feel and be alive.

Howard Thurman:

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.

A bunny nibbling on the path at Tennessee Valley

A post on which to stand, augment and enjoy the view. Tennessee Valley

Posted on July 22, 2026July 22, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Learning from Our Fellow Friends

A friend’s neighbor has an aviary and a tortoise who seeing an open gate escapes. I never thought of tortoises having a desire for escape, but as my friend says they are patient in their travels. We all know Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare. Seeing this tortoise, I’m reminded of the movie Lucky by David Lynch which shows the power of diligence and determination. I recommend the movie, and honoring strength in a tortoise pace and grace.

Taco, the tortoise captured after another excursion to the other side of the gate!

Posted on July 20, 2026July 20, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

To Be Porous

Because I love the poetry of Jane Hirshfield, I loved this interview with her on YouTube at “Jane Hirshfield at PoetryEAST”.

I return to many of her poems but this is one of my favorites. From watching this interview I learned that most of her poems come from what she’s experienced or seen. This is not imagined. It’s “real” though the leap of vision is hers, “To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me”.

The Supple Deer

The quiet opening

between fence strands

perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves

four feet off the ground

the deer poured through.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns

into a stream, an arc of water,

I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer:

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

– Jane Hirshfield

Artwork of a deer on an outside door at Commonweal in Bolinas, CA

Posted on July 19, 2026July 19, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Art

My friend Mirka Knaster, a member of Fiber Dimensions, a group of highly talented fiber artists in the Bay Area has a blog focused on art, specifically fiber. In this post she writes about the Chiharu Shiota exhibit currently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

Mirka writes: Yarn installations are Shiota’s way of “painting” three-dimensionally, outside of a canvas. The thread functions the way a line does in a painting. Strands of red yarn are connective webs that resemble blood vessels or neurons in the brain. In Diary, papers and photographs are embedded in the web. Shiota says: “When the body is gone, the objects which surrounded them [sic] remain behind….As I wander the stalls of the markets in Berlin, I find especially personal items like photographs, old passports and… diaries. Once, I found a diary from 1946, which was an intimate insight into the person’s life and experiences. While [I am] looking at those [handwritten] pages, their inner self is revealed, and I can feel their presence.” This installation reflects on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II through lingering traces of history in the objects Shiota finds and in the absence of the humans who once had them.

Check out her post: https://www.mirkaart.com/blog/2026/7/14/symbolic-red

It’s only on view at the Asian Art Museum until July 27. https://asianart.org

Here is Shiota’s website: https://www.chiharu-shiota.com/top