Cathy's Blog!

Posted on October 11, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

A Dream So Real

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.

My mother at 78, two months before she passed.

Posted on October 10, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Rodeo Beach this Morning

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.

We can’t walk past the rocks, so pause and observe the changing dance.

Rock rests like an elephant, trunk atop the water.

Posted on October 8, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Listening to the Wind

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 response to 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”.

Posted on October 6, 2026October 6, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Cohering

Our youngest son is 49 years old today. I’m remembering back and forward, sitting in the light of delight.

Where does one hold the years? I feel like an origami swan, folding and opening, folding and opening, until one day, like paper, I’ll dissolve.

Posted on October 5, 2026October 5, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Meeting What Comes

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 trees

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!

Posted on October 2, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Impermanence

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.

Posted on September 30, 2026September 30, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Grief, Healing, Air

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 struggle to understand and process grief.

I found Warwick’s floating home comforting, and now I find his words of 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.

Entering to look across to our mother, Mt. Tam!

Walking up to enter the boat at low tide.

On the back deck which greets the morning sun.

Posted on September 30, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Read a Novel

The September 28th issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article on Barbara Kingsolver, an author whose books I love, especially The 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.”

Posted on September 29, 2026September 29, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

The World Around Us

This morning the moon is shining in the sky. Yesterday I was at Sutro Baths on a perfect day.

Lao Tzu:

Just remain in the center watching. Then forget you are there.

Posted on September 27, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Nature’s Gifts

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.