Posted on by Cathy Edgett

A Win So Huge

Tonight I’m reflecting on the magnitude of the November 3rd win, the celebration around the world.  This wasn’t just about this country.  This was about decency everywhere.

Today I walked along a water inlet in Kentfield.  I learned that the continuing high tides mean harbor seals are seen where they’ve never been seen before, and here we are, returning on a higher tide than we’ve seen before.  I didn’t see seals today but I saw reflections, and that fits what we’re doing now, as we reflect on what happened and what comes forth now.

Reflection of Mt. Tam in the water.
One Egret, not Two!

Reflecting!

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Awaiting the Election Results

I’m going through my journals from 1990.  They’re printed out on paper, thank you trees, and now it’s time to recycle, and remember what I can.  We had amazing neighbors, Bob and Louise Jenkins, who built their home themselves after World War II. In 1990, she was an active 65 year old. She told me how she grew up in the country on a farm where everyone had chores. There was no electricity or indoor plumbing, so she grew up with chamber pots. She did her homework with a Coleman lantern which was a luxury after using a candle.  Everyone canned and she learned to can from her mother and grandmother at the age of 7.  She spoke of her ancestors.  One brother killed another over land leaving a widow with many children.

I contrast this with today, my life of luxury and my search for the right health care solution as we can change plans around our birthday month if we can make it through the choices.  Imagine Medicare for all – so simple, fair, kind, and overall, saving money.  Imagine on this day of change.

Sausalito on a calm evening

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

A Memory

I’m going back through my journals.  In February, 1990, I was taking a poetry class where we were given an ethics question.  If we could only rescue one from a burning museum, would we choose to rescue an old woman or a Rembrandt?  That day I’d been at a convalescent hospital where my son was playing his flute along with others who studied with a wonderful teacher. In the audience was a resident, a woman with only a few teeth who tried to converse with the man next to her saying “I hope we sing again.” Then, my son played and when he finished, she clapped her hands, and said, “It sounded like a bird.”

I think the choice of who we save is clear.  The vote is tomorrow.  Despite the interference of billionaires, may the results of what matters be overwhelmingly defined.

Photo of Autumn in Hudson NY sent from a friend.

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

This Time of Year

For me, it offers time to reflect as the veil between the living and the dead is said to thin. We’ve been dealing with flooding which affects our ability to get to and from the freeway, and to travel around the side streets. It’s a mindfulness practice, and requires attention and presence.  I now have a webcam link to the freeway so I can monitor when to leave, return, and stay tucked. I keep wondering how anyone can deny climate change as most of us are affected in some way. I was at The Presidio yesterday on a beautiful day. A place that was built to defend now radiates healing, connection, communion, and peace.

View of Angel Island
Andy Goldsworthy’s Earth Wall created in 2014.
The Presidio Museum honors the Japanese who were U.S. citizens and were rounded up and incarcerated during WWII.



Posted on by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

May Sarton

Going back through my journals,  I’m currently in 1989.  I was enamored with the books of May Sarton, with her wisdom, probe, examination, and investigation.  From A Shower of Summer Days by May Sarton.

“Any real exchange between the young and the old is nourishing.  And no love is wasted.” “Getting old is only disgusting if you fight it with the wrong weapons.”  “One doesn’t know, one senses.” 

From As We Are Now:

“Old age is not interesting until one gets there, a foreign country with an unknown language to the young, and even to the middle-aged.”

“Only our pain brings us back into compassion.”

“Sometimes silence is the greatest sign of understanding and of respect.”

“Don’t let them steal your mind,” with tranquilizers.

“I am gathering together all that matters most, tasting it for the last time.”

And isn’t that what we should always be doing and being, tasting for the last time, perhaps over and over again?

“Absolute nakedness is required, so that we are all one and there is no wall between the living and the dead.”

Blooming all the way to change!

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Celebration of Variety

Each day I read Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac.  Today I’m intrigued by the life of Anne Tyler whose books I love.

It’s the birthday of novelist Anne Tyler, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1941). After she was born, her parents moved the family to various intentional communities; she spent most of her childhood in a community in the mountains of North Carolina. Her family raised milk goats and grew their own food, and she learned folk crafts and traditional music. Eventually, her parents moved the family to Raleigh, where she was sent to public school. She felt like a total outsider — she had never used a telephone, and her feet were so calloused from going without shoes that she could light a match on her bare feet. She said of her childhood: “I learned to be alone and to entertain myself by imagining, and when I left the commune I looked at the regular world from an unusually distant vantage point.”

One summer, she was working on a tobacco farm and she found a book by Eudora Welty at the library. She read the short story “The Wide Net,” and it changed her life; specifically one line of it, which was: “Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the C got through the L in a Coca-Cola sign.” Thinking about that sentence, she said: “It was a kind of revelation: I knew dozens of people like Edna Earle — small-town, ordinary. I just didn’t know you could write about them.

Pumpkins and Gourds come in all forms and sizes!

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Breathing the Air We Share

I was at Rodeo Beach this morning on an exquisite day.  I felt my lungs and chest expand while inhaling the refreshing cleanliness of the air.  Meanwhile Trump continues to dismantle pollution controls for no reason that makes any natural sense.  Dead birds and seals lie dead on the beach, a result of starvation because the fish they eat are swimming deeper to reach the cooler water, water that is  warmed by climate change due to pollution.  I recommend Nicholas Kristoff’s column today to reinforce what we know the Trump administration is doing with hope to bring morality back.

Nicholas Kristoff ends with this after listing all the damage Trump has done even as he and his family made 2.2 billion in a year.

None of this is normal. We are betraying other countries but also our own history and culture. I always wondered what citizens of ancient Rome, a proud and sophisticated empire, thought when one of their crazy emperors came to power; now I have a glimmer of understanding.

“This is the greatest heist in the history of the world: stealing America,” the singer Bono said of what has unfolded. “Everything we love is on the line,” he told me.

A gull watches the sunrise
Two gulls watch the day arrive, one on each rock.
A dead crab blends in with the colors of rocks.
Two dogs focus as their person surfs
A day for waves

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Birth Days

My grandson turned 7 yesterday.  I am 77 today.

I was feeling a little shocked by that number,  but then I read that  “as a repeating sequence or “angel number,” 77 amplifies the core traits of the number 7—intuition, introspection, and a search for higher truth. It signifies that you are aligned with a higher consciousness or divine guidance.

Ah, the wisdom of age.

On my 60th birthday, my brother said: The bright side of getting older is the more candles you have, the more cake you need.

On another note,  I read that Hegseth insisted the historical Eisenhower globe be moved to his office. Usually such a process is overseen by trained curators, but he couldn’t wait, so he had his people move it. They dropped it, and now the globe is cracked and gashed, like the damage this administration does to the planet the globe represents.

The full moon this month is on October 26. The election is November 3rd. I think of these words of Hazrat Inayat Khan:

Full moon, where will you be going from here? – Into a retreat. Why do you take a retreat after fullness? – To make myself an empty vessel in order to be filled again.

May this election lead to the change we want to see and be.

The sky last night at 6:22 PM
And then so quickly the softening at 6:23. Change happens like that. Impermanence.