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.
Yesterday I learned of the Ok glacier in Iceland, which was declared dead in 2014 because it was no longer able to move because of its shrunken size due to climate change.
On August 18th, mourners gathered to commemorate its loss and climbing to the top of the mountain on which it once lived, placed a plaque to mark its loss.
The words written by Icelandic author Andri Snaer Magnason, melt the heart. May our melting hearts bring greater connection and awareness, not more loss.
“Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as glacier. In the next 200 years all our main glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
Today in my Zoom call quartet, one person mentioned an anecdote from Frank Ostaseski’s wonderful book, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us about Living Fully. He’s in a consignment shop with his daughter when he realizes many of the items for sale wear tags “As Is”. He thinks how great it would be if each of us wore a tag saying “As Is”, and believed it.
We decided our little group should sport t-shirts pronouncing, “As Is”.
As I peruse The Five Invitations once again, I come across two death poems from Japan where the tradition is to write a poem on the last day of your life or soon before.
Here is the death poem of Dogen Zenji who died in 1253.
Four and fifty years
I’ve hung the sky with stars
Now I leap through –
What shattering!
Here, with a different tone, is the death poem of Moriya Sen’an, who died in 1838.
Bury me when I die
beneath a wine barrel
in a tavern.
With luck
the cask will leak.
And with that, I consider how we meet the moment as it comes, honoring gathering and scattering as One.
Losing a piece, this rock wears a new face, continuing a tradition “as is”
The light continues to astonish me. I’m waking at 4:15 to watch the moon play peek-a-boo through the fog as the fog moves in and out, thickens and thins. Then the sun tickles everything pink as it ripens the day and twinkles right through this being I perceive of as “me”.
It must be my age, my rising in years and ripening, but these days, this “me” seems to be living in geologic time. I’m thrilled that the land mass of the earth was all one and then it separated into seven continents.It feels like my moods, coming together and apart, allowing unity and expansion, and within that, intention to give space but not divide, judge, or compare.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that the first cells emerged, though it was 4 billion years. That’s a great many candles to put on a cake.
I wonder if I remember 3.9 million years ago when photosynthesis emerged. And then 2 billion years ago when multicellular organisms came together to energize on oxygen. I think of all the cakes I’d bake if I’d been there, but of course, in an evolutionary sense, I was. My components formed inside the stars. I come from expansion and contraction. It is my base.
Meanwhile, my politically positive daughter-in-law is pregnant with a little boy and we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new energy and buoyant voice on the planet. He’ll be wearing this soon as he makes the rounds in his stroller to Get Out the Vote!!
It’s Saturday. I rose at 5, and looked for the moon, but she was tucked in fog.
I sat on the couch with Tiger and Bella, a blanket over my lap, and closing my eyes felt them moist and expanding, cells like wands.
I fell asleep to wake from a vivid dream. A window was open and that made sense since in the dream it was the room where my brother passed away. I picked up wet sheets and pillowcases, and rocks fell out, and feeling what we leave behind, I burst into tears, and sobbed and sobbed. I thought I can’t stop no matter what, and then I woke up disoriented, wondering if the dream was telling me I haven’t cried enough tears, haven’t mourned enough.
I sit here now, the fog quiet and still. Early this morning, wind chimes sounded like church bells. I felt how when someone I love dies, this world seems like a matte painting, as though I’m missing something, which of course I am, but somehow today, there is fluidity and fullness in the layers, waves in the embodiment I seem to think I am.
A bison who lived in the bison paddock in Golden Gate Park died yesterday. 8-year old Brunhida had kidney disease.
I am with loss and change as I sink in and out of this beautiful poem by W.S. Merwin on gratitude and honoring thanks.
ThanksBY W.S. Merwin
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
Gratitude scents and colors the air outside The Legion of Honor
This morning I settle into the words of Marion Milner, author in 1934 of A Life of One’s Own. She writes:
I’m really only interested in finding more and more ways of saying what I feel about the extraordinariness of the world and of being alive in it.
I want that too and yet today there is a warmth in my heart, that fire between flame and embers that simply wants to be with light in the trees and awareness that oxygen was once poison and then two billion years ago, we creatures who need it came in to balance the overabundance of oxygen with our intake, utilization, and release of carbon dioxide. How amazing is that!
I’m also with George Eliot’s words from her amazing book Middlemarch:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
Today, even as I cultivate all sides of silence, curving all sides into a circle, then dissolving in and out, I allow my ears to reach out into the universe with intention to receive.
I’m crazy for the moon. I love watching its phases, and receiving its reflected light. Last night I was outside absorbing and appreciating its rise, and now early this morning I watch it set.
I’m reminded of Hafiz’s poem as translated by Daniel Ladinsky.
With That Moon Language
Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to
them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full
moon in each eye that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language, what every other
eye in this world is dying to hear?
Yesterday I was fascinated to learn about Wind Phones. Catherine Browder in New Letters, A Magazine of Writing and Art writes about Mr. Sasaki, who in honor of his favorite cousin who died, set up a telephone booth with an old rotary phone because he needed to “talk” to his cousin about his grief.
After the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster in Otsuchi, where he lives, he opened the booth to anyone who wanted to talk to their loved ones. He calls it “the phone of the wind” because the words reaching out for comfort aren’t carried over a phone line so they must be carried by the wind.
The author of the story decides to create her own “phone of the wind”. A carpenter friend makes the booth. Knowing Mr. Sasaki’s phone booth has a path with a wooden bench nearby, placement is discussed and honored so those who need to talk in private, can come.
In May of 2011, three months after Japan’s disaster, a devastating tornado blew through southwest Missouri picking up her husband’s truck. He was killed.
She goes to the booth to talk to those she loves, sees these conversations, as “the only way I know how to shape a prayer”. She’s not the only one; people come.
I have space in my yard for a booth, but maybe a bench will do. I don’t need a phone and a booth. I can use the sun and the moon, their movement and offering of light. I can watch butterflies and birds, knowing one day I, too, will learn to fly and navigate the windwith inner light opened without boundaries of space and time.
Meanwhile, still early here, an owl hoots, who, who, who, vibrations on the wind.
If you are called, you can watch a documentary on “the phone of the wind” Rising moon last night
Setting moon this morning Owl beckons the coming of fall
Yesterday I watched a podcast of Mary Evelyn Tucker with Michael Lerner at Commonweal. That led me to her book Journey of the Universe.
I learn that the Large Magellanic Cloud, LMC, was once a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way, but then something destroyed it, and torn apart, it could no longer create stars.
It drifted about until it was drawn into a gravitational relationship with our Milky Way.
“The gravitational tidal force issuing from the Milky Way penetrated into the system of stars that formed LMC, and the structure of this smaller galaxy began to change. A regeneration of LMC was occurring in the presence of the Milky Way. And then an awakening occurred. A burst of star-making activity appeared in one of the dormant regions of LMC. For billions of years, LMC had drifted about, barren and dying. Now, suddenly, its potentiality was ignited through this interaction and new stars were evoked into being in all their brilliance.”
What does that say for each of us when we come into contact with the spark and gravitational field of certain others, particularly those with spirals?
I refresh on spirals learning that “in geometry, a spiral is a plane curve generated by a point moving around a fixed point while constantly receding from or approaching it”.
It’s a helix, and “in anatomy, a helix is the curved fold forming most of the rim of the external ear”.
I curve in understanding my gravitational field receives vibrations from yours, and together we curve, turning words into stars, and waves into land, as we toss generating easily, gleefully, and playfully back and forth.
Enjoy the dance, and savor touch, connection, change, and exchange.
This morning I again rose early to watch for meteors. I saw one, a faint one, and it was enough. I came in to sit with Bella and meditate, and as usual, thoughts muscled in, but I was gentle with them, receptive, and I opened to the image of a starfish and how it feeds by pushing its stomach out.
In contemplating why this image came right now, today, I realize I’m trying to reveal more of myself, to probe a little more, and discover why I’m here and how I ingest.
By the way, the starfish is now labeled a sea star because it’s not a fish. It’s related to sea urchins and sand dollars.
Today I looked down off the side of my deck and the light was such that the trunk of a tree looked like the fur and body of a squirrel. I tried to get a photo but just like meteors flying through the sky, it was a moment.
I was reminded of this photo from low tide at MileRock Beach. Sometimes low tides, like hard times, expose new places in which to dwell, explore, cultivate, change, and thrive.
