My friend Lee Klinger Lesser in her Substack Post shares about her wonderful journey through Japan. On the trip, they took a strenuous, four-day hike through countryside along the coast guided by “Walk Japan”.At one point, they’re walking along, tired and thirsty, when they entered a small town, and hearda truck with a sweet melody playing. Lee was reminded me of her childhood when the “Good Humor Ice Cream” truck would travel through the neighborhood. Thinking ice cream might be available, they looked around and saw a compact garbage truck stopping nearby. “A man came out with his garbage and put it into the truck. He and the driver gave a little bow to each other. Then the truck continued on its way.”
Two realtors were just here to evaluate our home. They say it will sell. The question is our timing, motivation, and what we hope to receive. I feel ready. I have flat boxes in the garage. They put some together for me, and I come to this room, a room with a huge amount of books. I find two that can easily go, and then get caught up inThe Poetics of Space, The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places by Gaston Bachelard. I read:
Anne Balif: “Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in deeply-rooted foundations.” She goes on to describe what a drawing of a house reveals. I sit with this as I think of what this house reveals about me. This house is beautiful, loved, and cared for. It’s safe. It’s protected us all these years. It’s private. We have wonderful neighbors. Why are we moving? I want to be closer to our grandson, and family. That’s the door-opening key.
And now I openOn Art and Mindfulnessby Enrique Martinez Celaya. What sparks in this choice to move? Am I lengthening the rays of my life like sunlight this time of year? Lengthening a place on which to stretch and listen to the wind?
From the book: Art reconciles the conceptual and the sensible and makes connections between ideas and world that are difficult to make otherwise. It reconciles aspects of experience that are rarely considered together. Take Michaelangelo’sPieta:Is it marble? Is it death? Is it loss? Is it compassion? The power of the sculpture rises from the co-existence of all these questions.
And this move. Is it a sculpture that’s mine to mold and unfold?
If I’m a river, does the river ask where it’s going? It simply flows and navigates rocks and banks and eddies and either keeps going or stops. And now today, my task is to move books like stones, to enhance the song my river currently sings, and see what comes.
I’m reading the latest book on the Lewis and Clark expedition. It’s a more whole, incisive, and personal look at why it took place and who and what was involved. It’s the perfect book to honor the original people who were here, and how they lived. According to this, the native people didn’t eat dogs, though they did trade them to the Lewis and Clark group who, when hungry, did.
I recommendThis Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clarkby Craig Fehrman. I was hesitant to start reading, and now I’m riveted. Unfrostbitten and well-fed thumbs way up!
Mirabel, mainly fur, is happy to live where she knows she won’t be eaten by those planning to take over her home.
I woke early this morning but then thought it’s Sunday and a three day weekend, so just a little bit more. I fell into a dream that when I woke I thought my mother was alive. She was alive in the dream and so with me, and I feel her here now. Love. Support.
We bought this house in 1978. It was meant to be temporary. We both moved a great deal as children, and thought that was how life should be. Every few years, a new home, a new place, but then, we settled in and saw how wonderful it was to see our children’s friends grow into adults, to know long-term friendship and support. And, now, we’re getting older. We need to move. Yesterday I walked with a friend of 47 years at Rodeo Beach and we both agreed we want and need to live near our children. It’s time. Which brings me to the task of what it is to downsize.
In The New Yorker this week is a cartoon I cut out to put on my fridge. A couple is standing in front of their house looking at a Storage Pod container. The caption is “They grow up so fast – remember when it was just a little junk drawer?”
I think of vases. I have every size and color of vases. I love each one. Which ones are now released to travel out into new worlds? This morning’s dream supports me. My mother is here. Everything is here, and I’m full as I begin the task of spreading my wings, after cleaning each feather – and yes, I have a collection of feathers, rocks, and I’m full with the space for breath. I am a multitude, and as a multitude, I move along in the journey of breath becoming air.
Mirrored in FlightMy mother at 78, two months before she passed.
The tide was pouring in so we couldn’t check out our usual haunts. Oddly it was low in the lagoon, though up by the ocean, and the whole beach was wet from the high tide before. Being with the ocean helps with the continuing shock of the political news.
Alan Watts: I think this is why I love the ocean. It’s the most difficult part of nature to mess up with emblems and symptoms of man’s dissociated consciousness. It’s an environment in which the awareness of our roots can awaken, in which space (so real because of the light and color) can be seen to be joining things instead of separating them. Yes. And I’ve just discovered that knocking on the wall of space and consciousness was my own heart beating.
Egrets convene in the morning low tide.We can’t walk past the rocks, so pause and observe the changing dance.Rock rests like an elephant, trunk atop the water.A curl of embraceExuberance in sharing the liftSpray of dispersionCaress
When Anne Carson was informed she won the Nobel Prize in literature, there was a short talk and then the poet responded she was “in Iceland,” where she was “listening to the wind“.
What a beautiful responseto winning such a prize.
It’s Fleet Week in San Francisco, and on a beautiful, warm, blue-sky day, the Blue Angels are rumbling the air overhead. I love seeing the response of the birds It’s as though they want to show how easily and relatively quietly it can be done.
Today I read there’s something in educational circles called the “400-word wall”.It seems after reading 400 words, not pages, words, people “begin to feel fidgety or need distraction or need to look at something else”.
I think most of us are noticing our attention span isn’t what it once was, but for me, this is even more motivation to stay with what I’m doing and “listen to the wind”.
We spent the weekend with our almost seven year old grandson. That meant being coached in soccer and baseball. He found it astonishing to learn that I never played soccer in school. The sport is new to this country, well, new if you’re my age, which brings me to age. I feel young, though this morning when I rose from bed, I realized that swinging a bat, reaching for that satisfying connective thunk, involves more muscles and flexibility than I recognized. Morning invites a stretching back out.
It’s odd to realize the years ahead of me are not what I’ve left behind which makes them even more precious and valued. It’s a new and deeper experience of the passage of time. It’s as though each cell in the marrow of my bones is jumping up and down, and cheering, “You’re here! Congratulations! Celebrate!“
I’m with the words of Alice Walker: The more I wonder, the more I love.
I’m wondering and loving, as the words of this Tibetan prayer reverberate through me.
May I be at peace. May my heart remain open. May I awaken to the light of my own true nature. May I be healed. May I be a source of healing for all beings.
May I be Kind.
Looking through the rising and branching of treesWhat frames my view now?Learning to take a stance to hit a ball out of the field and over the fence!Learning to run with exuberance and joy to kick the ball to meet the goal!
Each time I look up, the sky is different. This is always true, and yet, here where the fog plays games it seems even more so. Sun, wisps of fog, full enclosure of fog, sun. Change.
My book group discussed how we meet what comes, this aging, now called Saging process, that is so illusive, like life, but it becomes more clear as wisdom moves like waves of fog in, out, and all around.
