I've written three books, each a part of my journey to elderhood. Now with this blog my intention is to give a moment to moment accounting of my life as it is now, and now, and now. I'm a leader and student of Sensory Awareness, and a practitioner of Rosen Method. I believe in the connective and collective power of Love.
I’ve been cleaning out and organizing closets. I feel the shift in the energy in my home, an opening and entry into spaciousness. I woke this morning from a dream where I was noticing corners of my house that were stagnant and holding energy. I was clapping and ringing bells, singing “wake up”. Perhaps that’s what this time together, yet separate, is about, a cleansing release.
A few days ago, I was introduced to the website One Planet Poetry. You write a haiku and in the fourth line add another word. Each “coronaku” is related to the writer’s experience of the pandemic and its accompanying quarantine, self-isolation, and social distancing.
It’s fun. Write a haiku with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Then, one word.
The moon is exquisite, a bright light in the morning sky.
I’ve never been much of a shopper but I’m having dreams of shopping, of entering stores, clothing stores, book stores, plant stores, and seeing arrays of products beautifully and lovingly arranged and displayed.
I try to support mom and pop shops, and I want them to make it through this. Meanwhile turkeys are gobbling away this morning. They love to talk.
I’m beginning to take in that things won’t return to “normal” whatever we might have thought that was, and truly no moments are ever the same, but this is such a huge world-wide shift.
The sun just touched the ridge.
Wake, we’re told over and over again, in so many ways. Wake!
I woke this morning feeling myself as a hovercraft floating over the waves. I hopped out of bed excited to discover a new tool to inspire.
I’ve been working with allowing my ups and downs to flow like the waves in the ocean, to go in and out with the tides, but today brings a new image with which to play.
Enjoying flowing like a hovercraft, I realized I needed to refresh on the difference between a hovercraft and a hydrofoil.
Because a hovercraft uses a giant fan, it can travel on land or water. Christopher Cockerell experimented with vacuum cleaner tubes, and empty cat food and coffee tins to discover that when he placed a small can inside a larger one, and blew air through the smaller one, it hovered above the bottom surface of the larger object. He had a working prototype in 1955 and a patent in 1956.
In 1988, we traveled with our children on a hovercraft from Calais, France to Dover, England. That was before the Chunnel which opened in May of 1994. The opening of the Chunnel led to the last hovercraft crossing in 2000. 20 years ago – how can that be?
A few years ago, Steve and I sped back and forth on a hydrofoil from Hong Kong to Macau. A hydrofoil boat uses an underwater wing to travel over the water. It skims the surface like a bird.
Yesterday I admitted I was having a hard time with sheltering-in-place. Because I have a beautiful place to be, and I’m an introvert, I felt I had no right to complain, and certainly complaining isn’t always helpful, but it’s important to feel what’s there and allow it to flow through.
Confessing I was struggling freed something in me, for this moment anyway. After all, I am a process, a verb, so who knows where and when I next swerve but for now, I’m lifting over the waves and floating on air.
That brings me to the movie Inside Out. It might be a good time for each of us to watch this movie that explores our emotions, and how they come together, or don’t. How do we balance what’s happening inside and out?
Here’s a trailer for it, and maybe that’s enough if you’d rather be enjoying the trees, birds, and moon both inside and out.
I thought the rain was over, but my husband was sitting outside in the dark this morning when he heard his friend skunk’s shuffle, and raccoons rumble, and then what sounded like elephants. Rain. More rain.
Enjoy and savor what comes, and if you need to rise about it for a moment, or two, fill yourself with air and float. Be buoyant in this song we dance with gravity and air.
When one is by the ocean, life is so clear with the ocean waves moving up and down, and the tides moving in and out.
Of course this movement is observable everywhere when we pause to let this journey percolate in and out. Currently I’m in a trough awaiting the rise.
In Brian Doyle’s book, One Long River of Song, he writes: Birds are how air answers questions.
That statement stops me in my currently very limited tracks.
Sheltered-in-place, I have time to sit with those six words for hours, be with them like a Zen koan.
It’s gray today, birds tucked, but when they appear, I will watch them differently, as I reflect on and wonder about the birds fluttering in the air withinas it moves and passes in and out.
Last night the sky cleared and I stood under the almost full Pink Moon, enchanted by the sparkling of Sirius, the Dog Star. Outside in the night, I found it hard to comprehend all that is going on in the world today. Nature says, I’m here, and movement is happening as it has been since you were born, and before.
Two giant pandas have been living together in the Hong Kong zoo for 13 years but couldn’t get in the mood for greater intimacy, even though they were shown how-to movies. Now, with the zoo shuttered, courtship occurred, culminating in the desired result.
It’s a big deal as female giant pandas are receptive and fertile for just 24 to 72 hours each year. Now, the hope is that baby pandas are on their way, so it’s not another year before opportunity presents. It’s clear now that pandas, like most, need privacy.
Enjoy the sky, both night and day, and give yourself privacy and space as you shelter-in-place.
Here’s the prime minister of New Zealand reassuring children the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are “essential workers”. She also points out these are complicated times, and the Easter Bunny may need to be home with his or her own bunnies, so we can each put an Easter Egg picture in our windows, so children can still enjoy an Easter egg hunt. It will be like the Bear Hunt, only now for Easter Eggs.
It’s Monday morning, a new week, and I’m awakened at 4 by my cat needing to go out.
I rise to meditate with intention to surrender to the current situation. I believe that when we surrender, we are held like a baby, rocked. Buoyancy is our rock as we lean into movement grounded in stillness, in support.
When we were cleaning out our basement, I came across a treasure trove of journals from 1993. I haven’t felt ready to go back through them, but since I’ve now exhausted every mode of distraction as I shelter-in-place, today I open to some pages from November, 1993.
I had returned from six weeks in Nepal, four of them in the region of Everest, Khumbu, and was struggling to adjust to the abundance and busyness here. I found it disorienting that people who had so much didn’t seem as happy as people who had so little. Perhaps it was the closeness to death there, and nature. Their feet knew the ground, and of course a constant bowing and saying “Namaste”, “I see the spirit in you, and therefore in myself”, also helped.
Wanting to understand and integrate my return, I walked with a friend to Tennessee Valley Beach and we talked. She grew up in the Bahamas on an island where there was no electricity, no phones. She spoke of the earth and nature, and said people who are close to the earth, who are farmers, are warmer and more generous people. She said the people on her island are religious and aren’t into material things. She said, “as you accept natural reality, you begin to understand other human beings as people, and you understand what it is to live, love, share”. She said the White House and our government do not set an example or model. That was 1993.
She then asked, “How can we survive? How can we make it better for our children?”
In Nepal, I learned to be comfortable with silence, to wait. After all, I’d returned from a small room where I spent a week with a gecko who was my friend and companion. We were together, but didn’t speak.
My friend answered, “We can love and pray. Science and religion are now connected. The mind is healing.”
She continued: “People here expect things to be handed to them but happiness is within. We are made to reach out and help each other. True happiness is when you help someone.”
I sit with that now. We’re seeing that in action. People are helping each other, seeing and feeling connection even as, or maybe because, we are isolated in place.
What matters right now, this moment?
Perhaps being with what comes, right now, this moment, is the answer.
I loved quotes then, as now, and this gem anchors this portion of my journal.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
“It is with the capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.”
“Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment.”
In Mill Valley, we howl at 8:00 each night. Someone has designed 8 styles of t-shirts and we’re voting on which one represents us best.
In the Castro area of San Francisco, a man plays the bagpipe each night from his roof. His mother inspired the idea when she reminded him of the legend that the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a town in Germany, piped during the Black Plague to drive away plague-infested rats.
We now have a yeast shortage because so many people are baking their own bread.
What’s the San Francisco solution to a lack of yeast? Sourdough bread. It carried us through the Gold Rush.
A man in the Bernal Heights neighborhood in San Francisco has thumbtacked baggies of sourdough starter to a telephone pole.
The attached sign reads:“FREE SOURDOUGH STARTER. His name is ‘Godrick.'”
I’ve now learned from a neighbor that it’s easy to start your own starter though it’s best to receive a well-used and aged gift. We humans are resourceful, and respond to a challenge, so here we are sheltered-in-place with time to think of how to give and share, and people are joyfully doing that.
It’s raining, so again today I’m wrapped in cleansing support.
Even so, my heart is heavy. Though I comfort myself with knowing I and my family and friends are currently safe, others are not. I embrace the immensity of what is going on.
We share a boat as we balance the up and down movement of ocean waves, the spread of a virus and fear in the air.
I read that college classes on Zoom show the differences in our lives, so one person may call in from a vacation home in Maine while another is struggling to help keep her family business alive. If all of this is about how we meet what comes, and an attitude of Is That So?, then I suppose a rounded expansion can hold it all, and yet, helping hands and hearts are needed now as we feel the importance of each one.
I keep seeing the image of Heaven as a place where people use long-handled spoons to feed each other, and Hell as a place where they starve because they don’t.
The Toastmasters Club which I was part of for many years is now meeting on Zoom, as is my Sensory Awareness community and one of my book clubs. I’m aware that yes, it helps to see each other on a flat screen, each of us in our own environment, but we are missing the energy exchange that occurs in person where our hearts literally reach out and energetically touch.
It’s said that communication is only 7 percent verbal and 93 percent non-verbal. The non-verbal component is made up of body language (55 percent) and tone of voice (38 percent). The numbers are disputed but I think we all know the visceral response we have to some people, and perhaps the power of the non-verbal helps explain how one person can contradict himself and utter nonsense, and still be in office.
Today is Palm Sunday. I remember walking out of church with a palm frond when I was young. It’s Holy Week, a time of introspection and celebration for some. Passover begins Wednesday evening. However one celebrates the blossoming and expansiveness of Spring, it will be different this year. Different, and yet heart connection is still there, even through screens, and I must admit I’m craving more touch, and yet, here I am, able to cultivate intimacy with myself, the movement and processes I am. I can welcome, follow, and be with the breath as it moves through and around me. I welcome this guest.
On another note, I read Heather Cox Richardson each morning as she summarizes the political situation of the day before.
Today I read:
In an interview on the Fox News Channel on Monday, Trump explained his objection to Democrats’ efforts to appropriate billions of dollars for election security in the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package. “The things they had in there were crazy,” he told the hosts. “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” On Wednesday, the Georgia House Speaker, Republican David Ralston, echoed Trump. He opposed sending absentee ballots to the state’s registered voters because the effort would lead to higher voter participation. That would “be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”
They are saying out loud what scholars of politics have known for a long time: the Republicans are a minority party. They win by keeping their opponents from voting, or by making sure their votes are undercounted.
A democracy is in crisis if the majority of its people do not support the party in power. We can manage a glitch or two, but a systemic perversion of the government through manipulation by one group or another will destroy our faith that our government truly represents us.
The times are precarious, requiring each one of us to be awake. Buds are opening their petals to sun, birds, and bees. Trees are spreading their branches, many with newly opened leaves. Fruit is forming, and so are we.
It’s time to cultivate even deeper, more expanded intimacy within ourselves and this world we share. Come to the present of presence, each moment, each breath!
And now I’m going to make blueberry muffins, as I digest what my son tells me about my five month old grandson who has discovered his shadow. What a treat!!
I make a fire in the fireplace, sit down on the couch with a book, two books.
My stomach is full; rain pours down, and a cold wind blows.
It’s as though we’re on our own little island here, and I read this from The Summer Book by Tove Janssen, and think yes.
“An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.”
I read about anchovies in Brian Doyle’s book, One Long River of Song. I learn that we don’t know much about anchovies but we know that their noses contain a sensory organ that no other creature in the world has. We know that “sensory complexes in their heads also form dense nets in the cheeks”. We don’t know why.
We don’t know exactly what they eat.
We know that their “hearing is perhaps the sharpest of any marine animal”, and perhaps that is why “they manage to swim in darting collectives that twist as one astonishing creature”.
I watch the flames in the fireplace as I consider how sheltering-in-place, if we have a place to shelter, puts us on an island, even as we vibrate with a similar rate of connective response to a virus we don’t see or yet understand.
Though it’s still daytime I light candles, savor flame inside and out.
