Cathy's Blog!

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

Handmade door for the fairies to enter a rock in my yard.

Posted on July 18, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Low Tide

This morning I noticed the darkness at 5:15. Yes, the fog is in but still there’s that sense of the tilt toward fall. I’m with the plants and creatures that survive at low tide, and then, again in the high tide, the covering, renewing, feeding, fertilizing.

Posted on July 17, 2026July 17, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Rodeo Beach at Low Tide

Today I was again at Rodeo Beach. I was surprised to see a hole in a rock I’ve taken zillions of pictures of but today the light and the closeness to it with the low tide allowed me to see right through it. I often see it as different animals, and today again invited imagining like looking at clouds.

Now I see the rock facing east, not west, nuzzling the rock next to it.

Walking further south than usual because of the low tide

Posted on July 17, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Who’s In Power?

In the photo below, what do you see? Is it a giant Heron next to a tiny house? It’s actually a full-sized playhouse with a normal sized Great Blue Heron standing next to it, but the Heron is in front of the house on a hill, and the camera angle skews sizing. In this way, Trump continues to distort what we know and see. He’s the one in power. He’s the one who shows tampering in the election process and yes China and Russia may be involved with their bots, but they are on the side of Trump, not the side of “we the people”. Who benefits from Trump’s policies? The super rich, and their money and news sources support Trump. Vote his cronies out!

Great Blue Heron stands proudly next to a full-sized house!

Posted on July 17, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

A Moment Is a Moment

My teacher of Sensory Awareness would say “A moment is a moment.” This morning I woke up to those words. There’s something about going through old photos that makes that so clear. All those moments.

I spent time yesterday in the garden after seeing photos of each reincarnation. It’s filled in beautifully, a gift.

I came across this photo from a neighbor’s garden, a paradise of flowers and birds. May we each have access to the garden within and this garden we share, and may we cultivate what matters to us now, and now, and now.