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.
I spent much of February 2023 on a houseboat in Richardson Bay. I went back and forth between my home which was experiencing a kitchen remodel and this exquisite creation of harmony, quiet, serenity and multitudes of egrets, herons, coots, and other water birds. I met the lovely man who owned the floating on water haven, Warwick Dunnitt, and when I saw a book on grief on the coffee table, I asked him about it. He’d lost his son at the “hands of an unscrupulous rehab center”.
Today I opened Marin Magazine and saw an article by Warwick on his book on grief and grieving. I downloaded it to my Kindle, and I’ve just begun, but I’m finding it beautiful and comforting. I know what it is to lose someone without warning. I know what it is to struggleto understand and process grief.
I found Warwick’s floating home comforting, and now I find his wordsof exploration and discovery. The title of the book is Dance with Angels.
On the last day of September, I read the first day of my October Flying Edna calendar.
You can not Believe in magic all you want, but that’s a lot like holding your Breath for your whole life because you don’t believe in Air.
And with that, I jump into the joy of air, magic and the loving care that connects, supports, and lifts in a melting coalescence of us all.
Outside the houseboat/floating home!Entering to look across to our mother, Mt. Tam!A Great White Heron saunters by!EveningWalking up to enter the boat at low tide.On the back deck which greets the morning sun.
The September 28th issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article on Barbara Kingsolver, an author whose books I love, especiallyThe Poisonwood Bible. Because I love her books, I’m intrigued.
She says:“A poem is like a unicycle, “balancing one idea,” but her novels are more like station wagons, crammed full of them.”
She points out we’re not wired for all the suffering we’re absorbing as we read the daily news stories.“There are limits to the human mind, a limit to the number of people the human animal evolved to care for.”The novel is the antidote to this.
“Novels draw you into human conflicts the way our brains are wired to experience them – as feelings, and there’s a big difference between information and feeling. We enter into the realities of other people through emotion, not information, and that’s what a great novel does.” “A novel isn’t a few seconds and then on to something else – the hodgepodge of randomness, equating things that are not equivalent. A novel brings you into the one-to-one, the intimacy of human relationships and human conflicts, for hours at a time.”
Root, rise, and branch – Revel in SplendorOne flower, leaves, branches, and sky – Sun’s rays slant fall light.
Last night, a full moon night, I looked up at 5:36 and saw colors playing with the clouds. The sun was to the right, and the moon had not yet risen, and yet, I saw a palette of color, specifically yellow, brightening the sky.
Then this morning I went down to the bay to look for river otters. No otters but what a realm of beauty on which to feast.
Colors light the sky.Rock and grasses of fall mergeReflectionThe tide comes in under the bridgeA gathering of Avocets Golden SlippersFeasting under the bridge
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!
