Yesterday I was at Muir Woods and saw the sign It Took a Movement to Save This Place. Tomorrow is All-Kings Day, a movement to save our democracy. May we all be there.
Movement
Awareness
I’m outside on these warm nights enjoying the new moon increasing and the sparkling stars. I’m with Rilke.
Yes — the springtime needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
Mark Bittner and his parrot friends inspired the 2003 documentary, “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”. If you want to feel the beauty he understood and felt, watch him on YouTube. I suggest you begin with All Life is One Whole. He died peacefully in his sleep with two dogs at his side. He was 74.
It’s Spring!
I’m struck by the flowers blooming along the path into the library. The rise seems so effortless. I’m with these words of Bruce Lee from his book, Be Water, My Friend.
Who is there that can make muddy waters clear? But if allowed to remain still, it will become clear of itself. Who is there that can secure a state of absolute repose? But keep calm and let time go on, and the state of repose will gradually arrest.
Serenity
I meditate to the sound of birds chirping and feel how the vibrations of their sounds invite the leaves of spring to come. My insides leaf and reach.
Neighboring
I continue to find the political news challenging. Then I come to Thomas Friedman’s column today as he responds to Trump and Stephen Miller. Thomas Friedman:
Well, Stephen, maybe you don’t know the real world after all, because your private ICE army — “governed by strength” and “force” — was sent packing by a bunch of moms and dads armed only with cellphone cameras and whistles, ready to walk out on a freezing morning in bathrobes and bunny slippers, to defend their neighbors, some of whom they barely knew.
Yes, Stephen, maybe you don’t know the “real world” after all, because the real score here is Neighboring, 1. Trumpism, 0.
Haiku
I’m reading Billy Collins’ book, Dog Show. I come to this haiku by Soshi, and I’m lifted on the wonder of life, so simple, so true.
Walking the dog,
you meet
lots of dogs.
Butterflies
When I’m outside these days, butterflies are fluttering all about me. It’s springtime, a time to connect.
Saturday, I came upon two Monarchs mating, and stopped to take pictures thinking it would be short-term, but finally exhausted from watching all the fluttering, I left. At home, I read that when monarchs mate, the male uses the claspers on the end of his abdomen to attach to the vaginal groove of the female. Once attached, the female cannot get away, and the male transfers spermatophore components to the female in a process that can take up to 16 hours.
16 hours and without Viagra. Amazing.
Collective Caregiving
I just watched Rebecca Solnit interviewed by David Marchese. The whole interview is worth watching but I’m sharing two of her responses.
One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war. I denigrate politicians I don’t respect as windsocks. I just want us to understand that most of the important change is collective.
Do you think Governor Newsom is a windsock? Not exactly. I’m watching the left gear up to attack Gavin Newsom just in case he’s the nominee in 2028, and it makes my heart sink, because I watched people tear down Al Gore, I watched people tear down Hillary Clinton, I watched people tear down Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. There are definitely major things to critique about every one of them, but at the moment, when the job is to defeat the other guy, we defeat ourselves.
May we be and cultivate the change we want to see in the world through and with collective caregiving, kindness, and oversight.
Our Host
As I continue to go to the natural world to counteract the news, I’m with the last stanza of William Stafford’s poem, “A Message from Space” from his book The Way It Is.
And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
“Everything counts. The message is the world.”
Above the Fog
Because I’m too old to be an astronaut viewing our fragile, diverse planet from space, I left the fog to drive up to the top of Mt. Tam, and circle through landscapes.
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