I’m out early this morning to have blood drawn. With an appointment time, all goes easily and well. I welcome the rising of the sun and the play of clouds.
The garbage truck is out with a wreath on its hood shining bright, colored lights.
The day floats easily and I find myself floating in the holidays, the holy days.
This comes:
Fingers widen sky
Tides embrace inner rhythm
Pillared, lengthened time.
Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being, between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other[s], nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.
— Thomas Merton
I sit with the words of Thomas Merton this morning, absorbed in the sound of the heater warming our house. It’s still dark as the solstice continues on approach. I love the clarity that comes with honoring the shifting of the light.
With the pandemic, I feel less dependence on words, almost as though I could let them go like leaves released from trees, and yet here I am wondering what to share.
I close my eyes and allow the top of my head to open and lift. Jupiter and Saturn come together on the 21st to form a Solstice star. This conjunction in the sky is another sign we are coming together to embrace what’s new.
With all that Trump has done that I find despicable, this with executions is the final slash. The good news is that this act of cruelty may end the death penalty. We come together for change.
A friend recommends the book The Power of Focusing by Ann Weiser Cornell. It’s been sitting here calling, almost like a demand, but in this month of December, I rise early to meditate and today, after immersion, I reach for the book.
My heart has been feeling heavy with the weight of the world.
Today, I read to listen to myself, as I would listen to a friend.
Listening to my body and the weight of my heart, I say to my heart: “Hello, Dear Friend Heart, thank you for being here for me. I’m here for you. I’m here to listen.”
Heart responds. I feel my heart as a giant thundercloud filled with water that with my listening, releases. Ah, rain, fluidity, renewal. Roots fill and reach. Tears that have been held moisturize and dissipate. Breath!
Breathing!
Breathed!
I don’t need to carry the world’s pain in my heart like a thundercloud. I can welcome, expand, and tenderize what constricts and holds anger, misunderstanding, and fear. I can become the ocean and sky and allow clouds to flow through me with ease and release. I say, yes to the marriages I carry within. I do.
It’s an emotional time of year, a time when darkness invites us to enter the sanctuary we are. Enter and listen. The light is here.
Last night I lit a fire and sitting by it, opened two new books I recommend.
One is Together in a Sudden Strangeness: American’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Alice Quinn. It’s filled with juicy, comforting and provocative offerings.
In the fourth stanza of George Bilgere’s poem “Facetime”, I learn this.
While in the closed down Tokyo Aquarium
these tiny eels – garden eels, they’re called –
are forgetting what we look like.
The aquarium keepers are worried
that the eels are getting lonely,
so they’ve hung iPads on the tanks.
They ask on their website, “Could you please
show your face to the eels from your home?”
And of course everyone is phoning the eels
which makes sense and is reassuring.
Part of me didn’t want to check if this was true, but then, I did and, yes, it’s true.
https://www.sciencealert.com/tokyo-aquarium-needs-your-help-reminding-their-eels-to-not-fear-humans.
Then, such a treasure, I open Barack Obama’s book, A Promised Land, and settle in with his humor, openness, and intellect. The book begins with two epigraphs.
The first is from an African American spiritual.
O, fly and never tire,
Fly and never tire,
Fly and never tire,
There’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land.
The second is from the Robert Frost poem “Kitty Hawk”.
Don’t discount our powers;
We have made a pass
At the infinite.
And then I travel back a few years in time and place. Steve sends me a photo from a tram soaring about the Rhine in Rudesheim.
And the rain pours down on a Sunday of King tides and no need to be outside.
It rained in the night and the morning is quiet and calm. I look out at clouds and trees, graced in exchange.
Edgar Degas wrote: Art is not what you see but what you make others see.
This morning I balance on these words of Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
“To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you.
That’s what I think a meaningful life is.
One lives not just for oneself, but for one’s community.“
We have a president-elect who lives for and creates community. May kindness, love, and generosity prevail.
The sky this morning is pure delight, and helps counter the sobering news of the day even as many people begin the celebration of Hanukkah and the lighting of a candle each night.
I light candles these days because I love the flickering light.
Like waves in the sea, the movement is never the same.
In the past, I’ve written a letter from the North Polar Bear to the younger people in my world. Tolkien wrote the Christmas letters to his children when he didn’t have money for presents. Each year the clumsy North Polar Bear managed inadvertently and accidentally to destroy the gifts, and the beautifully illustrated letter explained what happened.
This is such a strange year I suppose no explanation is needed, though Dr. Fauci has reassured us that Santa is immune to Covid and won’t be spreading the disease when he rides through the sky in his sleigh and slides down chimneys on December 24th.
Recently I read that Santa’s reindeer are female, not male. We know that because male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December.
Female reindeer retain their antlers until after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, the reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh, even Rudolph, are female.
They need new names. Perhaps Dashita, Dancerly, Prancine, Vixtoria, Comcie, Cupida, Dondorthy, Blixina, and Ruby with her shining red light of a nose.
A friend used the isolation of the pandemic to go through 25,000 photos. I’m still prancing around and maybe like the North Polar Bear my intention to light is floating flickering over the northern ground.
On further reflection, I’ve now re-read Twas the Night before Christmas, and there’s nothing that gives the sex of the reindeer, so the original names are gender neutral, and Rudolph came later. The story is scientifically accurate, well, if you believe reindeer can fly and carry a sleigh, and maybe the point is we can name the reindeer however we choose. Enjoy the play!!
Yesterday I found myself moist with tears. I read what it is to be a nurse in the ICU right now. It’s horrifying what we’re asking of these people as they deal with the pandemic, and then, they go outside and see people refusing to wear masks. It’s so simple. It’s like seatbelts. At first, we resisted, and now most of us can’t imagine driving without one. Now, I can’t imagine not wearing a mask.
When I read that Jimmy Stewart used his PTSD experience flying B-24’s out of England during World War II to film the intense parts of the film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” I realized I’d never seen the movie. I watched it last night. More tears.
Yesterday I read that “A herd of elephants marched twelve hours to the home of Lawrence Anthony after he died – the man who saved them. They stayed there in silence, mourning for two days. Exactly one year after his death, to the day, the herd marched to his house again.”
How do we explain that and do we even want to? Simply receive.
My healing mantra today comes from Malcolm X:
When we change the ‘I’ for the ‘We,’ even Illness becomes Wellness.
Ellen Bass’s poem “Ode to the Fish” concludes with these lines.
But beyond the cliffs
a blue whale sounds and surfaces, cosmic
ladle scooping the icy depths. An artery so wide,
I could swim through into its thousand pound heart.
Yesterday my heart felt heavy. Today I allow it to expand like the blue whale heart trusting the ladle and scoop.
In the Winter issue of Orion magazine, Rose Thater Braan-Imai offers “notes on living in kinship with nature”. Each “note” is a treasure.
I offer one.
When the senses are open,
they can freely come to agreement
about what is being perceived, or consensus.
In an experience of harmony
with the natural or temporal order,
can come an experience of certainty,
you can say that you “know”.
That experience, embedded in our cells,
is the memory of that field of harmony that births all life.
To live with time as an ally is to be in harmony with life.
I spent the day decorating for the holidays, always such a joyful journey down memory lane. That contrasted with lockdown starting tomorrow and a red flag warning of fire danger from wind and dryness, so I was out watering again today. It’s odd to hum Christmas carols and think of snow while the windows and doors are open and the plants all say, “Water, please!”
I think of the word evening. I suppose each day lately is an evening, balancing, and smoothing our outlook as we balance new rules and restrictions to wipe the virus out.
We’re again moving into tighter restrictions. I think of touch, of how we need to cultivate touch within and with ourselves.
I come to this wonderful poem by W.S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
