I was at Rodeo Beach this morning. It was low tide and the fog had settled in. All was calm, except for the dogs frolicking happily about. The dead seals from last week had washed out to sea with the full moon high tides, but there was a new one further down. Sadly, there were many dead Common Murres. Because of the warming ocean temperatures, their prey fish are too deep for them to dive down and reach them. They’re starving and dying.
I’m with the words of Mary Oliver: My work is loving the world.
Reflecting Father and Son fishing with seagull watching from the rock.And the waves come in. The seagull seems content to simply watch and be.Splashing SplendorForm and Non-form – Seagull still there.Gleefully Free!
I woke early this morning and rose to see the full moon in the sky, and bright stars with three forming Orion’s belt.
I continue to push the book by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor,End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. A friend said she was resisting because it sounds depressing. For me, it offers insight into what’s going on. My mantra has been “I don’t understand”. Well, now, I have more information and understanding of what is going on.
A group of the wealthiest and most corrupt want to control the planet and beyond, and they have the money to coerce, bribe, and blackmail their will. I’ll give one example that stunned me, but first, I’ll give two examples of how we’re awake and in that, connecting and learning how good it feels to help another, to work together. One example is Minneapolis. Trump targeted that city and they came together as neighbors and were able to push back on the invasion of ICE into their city.
Another example is the election of Mandami to mayor of NY city. The authors describe the door-to-door volunteer and community effort that led to that.
One thing I’ve really struggled with is why we haven’t paid our dues to the United Nations. Well, now I understand. The U.N. has a World Court, the International Criminal Court that judges war crimes. Trump and Netanyahu don’t want to be judged, don’t want to be in jail. Trump withheld billions in mandatory dues from the U.N. and withdrew from sixty-six international organizations. He also issued an “executive order claiming the authority to grant the Board of Peace,his creation, indefinite immunity from lawsuits and judicial processes”.
We know all this but here is where I really understood. This group of people, extremely wealthy people, view themselves as above the law. They don’t want constraints “that will make life on earth safe and sustainable, including the strict controls on nuclear weapons and generative AI that we needed yesterday”. They don’t want accountability for their crimes of war, and engagement in ethnic cleansing to the point of genocide. The authors go on but here’s where they really got me.
“For this reason, their greatest ire is reserved for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, an independent institution that has the power to issue arrest warrants.” Because the ICC has issued warrants for Netanyahu and others, the “Trump administration imposed retaliatory sanctions on nearly a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, causing them to lose access to US financial and tech services, including their credit cards and email accounts, since they are provided by US companies like Visa and Google. The United States also froze their personal assets and bank accounts and, because of the reach of US tech giants, was able to block most online shopping and ban certain travel – a level of punishment usually reserved for the world’s most dangerous terrorists.”
The authors go on to reveal other ways they intimidate those who try to hold them accountable.
I’ve been trying to avoid political posts, but this goes beyond U.S. politics. There’s a group of unfathomably wealthy people trying to take over our planet but the point of the book is that we can unite and overcome this. The time is Now.
At the marsh yesterday afternoonAn egret flies past the afternoon commute.A hummingbird sucks from a flower as evening comes. A Jay surveys the scene.It’s time to circle like flowers for our Planet Earth!
Today I settled into a rocking chair on the deck. My intention was to see if I could be still enough to see how many birds come to the fountain. I was glad I wasn’t wearing red as hummingbirds were swerving back and forth chasing each other in delight, and I wouldn’t want to have appeared as a food source. I recently learned that a group of hummingbirds is called a Bouquet.They flew too fast to be photographed as did a Monarch butterfly, a symbol of fall.
It’s Dolly Parton Day, 9 two 5. Perhaps that’s why the fountain celebrated and splashed with pink.
A house finch contemplates a plunge.And then, the splash. Yes! Feathers shine like glass.Washing and FluffingContemplatingCome on in – the water’s fine!Sharing A meadowlark comes to consider a fountain bathThe fountain is ours.Invitation to explore!
It’s a beautiful fall day. Last night I sat outside with the waxing moon on its way to fullness on September 26, the Harvest moon.
Equanimity is my guidance these days. AI defines it as “a mental calm and evenness of temper, especially in tough or stressful times. It lets you stay steady and clear-headed instead of reacting with panic, anger, or despair”.
Currently these are words to AI, words latched together without context, feeling, dedication, determination, or meaning. Who knows if or when it will come to understand what it means.
Meanwhile the political news is staggering. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s bookEnd Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living Worldhelps me understand the depth of corruption, and how tragic it is, as we fight for us all, humans, plants, animals, for the connection we share in the precious gift of living, loving, and dying.
The birds where I live are singing and tweeting as though it’s spring. It’s a cacophony of celebration and joy.I vibrate with the sound of their voices, the swish of their wings.
The rising moon last night.Robin at the fountain!Hummingbird feasts.Can you see the wings?
We continue to have fog, the mist giving a sense of mystery and an invitation to delve within. I’m with the words ofDag Hammarskjöld in his bookMarkings.
The longest journey is the journey inward.
That leads me to John Muir’s words found in his journal after his death.
“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
From the Muir Beach OverlookNesting Cathedral Grove in Muir WoodsRedwood tree standing after fireStories and dwellings in the trunk of a TreeThe creek is quiet on the fall equinox awaiting the winter rains.
This morning I’m with these words of Thich Nhat Hanh:
We don’t have to go anywhere to obtain the truth.
We only need to be still
and things will reveal themselves
in the clear water of our heart.
That brings me to my son and his wife’s whale watching trip. I thought they saw 20 whales but my son informed me that they saw three feeding groups, and one group had 35 whales in it. I’m feeling the magic, joy, connection, individuality, and serenity – fluidity. A wave of sea lions joined in to feast on the fish swarming in. Celebration is happening all around us.
Whales have complex brains. Like humans and other creatures, they feel complicated emotions. They grieve. One mother orca carried her lifeless calf around the globe for 17 days. She traveled more than 1,000 miles. Once on land, they returned to the sea, and now they come close so we can see more of what we are, and can be. We’re learning from trees and whales, and what’s revealed is inside the “clear water of our heart”.
Partake!Mirror neurons ignite!Snowy Egret at Rodeo Beach
Yesterday one son and his wife were on a whale-watching boat in Monterey. She took 18 videos and 87 photos. They saw 20 humpback whales and 200 sea lions and birds and waves. The whales were jubilant, jumping and spraying rainblows and waving their tails. It can only be joy and an intention to share. One whale came within five feet of the boat. A friend was in Baja this winter to be with the whales and their babies. The mothers want people to touch the babies. They’re reaching out to us.
I contrast that to a must-read book I’m reading. It’s an easy read. It explains what feels so hard to understand as we watch those in power seek to divide and destroy. I highly recommendEnd Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living Worldby Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor.
We can fight fascism when we understand what’s going on, the groups that have united to destroy the world because somehow they think they’ll be saved. Ego, anyone?
I tried to insert a video but I’m told the file type isn’t supported here. Visualize whales jumping and showing their tails, and spouting rainbows. An amazing experience.
A small taste of joy and blissGrace – it’s good luck to see rainbows in the spouts!
I’m reading a book,Do Glaciers Listen? by JulieCruikshank. She’s looking at how differently Westerners and the local Indigenous peoples in the area of the Saint Elias Mountains where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory meet, view and respond to glaciers.
One woman, Mrs. Annie Ned, speaks about “human and environmental history from her own experience of hunting, trapping, and living there for almost a century”. Her advice is to “listen for different stories”. The author then writes, “Eudora Welty, an American writer who, like Annie Ned, lived well into her nineties, also maintained that there is a distinction between listening to stories and listening for stories. “Long before I wrote stories,” she reflected in her autobiography, “I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.”
The Indigenous people in this book view glaciers as living entities. They interact with them and treat them with respect. Perhaps we, too, can listen for stories in what surrounds us where we live. What speaks and resonates?
I was at Rodeo Beach this morning. The Snowy Egrets were feasting and enjoying the low tide as the tide rolled in.
Finding Tidbits in the mudPossibly room for TwoNo, find your own spot!Water, Wood, Sand, and RockAnd the waves come in!
I went to Rodeo Beach this morning. My friend Elaine’s best friend for many, many years was cremated this morning. I wanted to honor her passage. I returned home to learn that Annie Dillard passed at the age of 81. I’ve read all of her books, some of them many times.
There were two dead sea lions on Rodeo beach when I was there on Saturday. I thought the high tide might have taken them or The Marine Mammal Center but they were still there as offerings. There is now a third one. I read thatThe Marine Mammal Center has seen an increase in sea lion strandings with signs of domoic acid poisonings. Domoic acid is produced during certain harmful algal bloom events. The neurotoxin accumulates in small fish, like sardines and anchovies, which are then eaten by marine mammals like sea lions in large quantities.
I don’t know if that’s why these sea lions died but they’re decomposing naturally on the beach. We humans do it differently but then there are many more of us.
At one point, I walked through two rows of upright feathers, carefully placed and spaced. Walking through felt like being part of a procession at a wedding or a funeral, celebratory in an honoring of joy and grief.
Walking through Feathers Golden Slippers flies byCompanionship Contemplating the WavesA carefully placed rock balances atop bigger ones as though set to savor the view.A Tangle of KelpA still-life with a crab, feathers, sand, and rocks.
Laureen and Elaine let me know at one in the morning that the Japanese character I posted around midnight means Wisdom. I gratefully think of how I have friends who stay up late, which brings me to the song Friends in High Places, that leads to Garth Brooks singing Friends in Low Places, which leads me to I have Friends in All Places. Is that wisdom or what?
Candle lit in morning light – Wisdom and Knowledge – water, earth, fire, airThe wind whispers and blows the flame to rest.Heartwood: Heart-LoveThe fog is in, softening morning light on the ridge and all around!
