The sky is coming to light with a soft-pink invitation to wake. 

Last night I took blankets and a pillow out on the deck to watch for meteors.  The moon was rising and it wasn’t yet dark but I was prepared to be part of the changing scene.  I fell asleep.

This morning I rose early and went outside to lean back in a chair.  Both kitties joined me. I saw nine meteors, each one unique. Two were major lengthy lights that evoked a loud “wow”.  Only kitties, owl, and a foraging creature down below heard my shout.

I sit here now aware of ripening light.

On another note, I read in Writer’s Almanac that sharpshooter Annie Oakley, born Phoebe Ann Mosey in 1860 in Woodland, Ohio, could, from 90 feet away, hit the thin side of a playing card that someone tossed in the air and then hit it six more times before it fell to the floor. 

She could shoot the wick off a burning candle or the ashes off the tip of her husband’s cigarette. 

Now that’s impressive.  

I’m reading David Brooks book, The Road to Character.  The first person he celebrates is Francis Perkins, the person now considered “the woman behind the New Deal”.  

The second is Ida Stover Eisenhower, the mother of Dwight D. Eisenhower.  I remember as a child seeing Dwight go by in a parade in Des Moines, Iowa. I must have been seven as he was re-elected in 1956.  There were shouts of “I like Ike”. My parents were for Adlai Stevenson but I recall no vitriol on either side though Stevenson labeled an “egghead”,  even though he wasn’t, didn’t help his cause. Even then, intellectualism was suspect in this country.

What’s amazing is how the Republican party has changed.  Eisenhower, a moderate conservative, continued New Deal agencies and expanded Social Security. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1958 and sent Army troops to enforce federal court orders that integrated schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

He created the Interstate Highway System, and promoted science education with the National Defense Education Act. 

In his farewell speech, he said:

As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Though he’d been a general before becoming president, he warned about the power and influence of the military-industrial complex.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

David Brooks is looking at what builds character, trying to understand how when World War II ended, this country celebrated with humility, and how now, the word “great” is bantered about with no attachment to meaning or substance..

I look up the meaning of the homonym of the word “great”. A grate is “a frame of metal bars for holding fuel when burning, as in a fireplace, furnace, or stove”. It’s “a framework of parallel or crossed bars, used as a partition, guard, or cover”.

What falls now between the slats and rises in the morning light?

In Alexander Technique work, the suggestion is to “Think forward and up to rise”. I’m with that now, thinking forward and up to rise. With that, there is no strain, and I open like trees to sky.

It’s clear today, blue sky a silent lake with only the occasional silver shine of an airplane skimming into SFO to land.

I’m with two quotes this morning, two ways of unfolding the origami swan of being.

One is a Navajo proverb.  Be still and the earth will speak to you.

Responding, I  listen to trees, birds, flowers, squirrels, worms, earth.  

Butterflies wing silently; bees buzz and dip.  

I circle on the words of Zen Master Suzuki Roshi.

What we call I is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.

I’m on a merry-go-round, the earth, of course, and I’m a child swinging on a gate, a door, and I’m honoring what circulates inside my skin as well as out. This place, a heart.  

Last night I was out watering at twilight.  The moon was shining in the sky and the light was magical.  Birds chirped thanks for the water and I was infused with gratitude.

Later, I went outside to look for meteors but the fog had drawn a shade over the moon and I knew no flashes would be seen by me that night.

This morning I was out early watering another part of the yard,  I heard the foghorns, but here, all is clear, in this moment, anyway.  The fog moves in and out, a playful and serious delight of peek-a-boo wrapped and unwrapped in the sky.

Enjoying being outside, I was reminded of when we spent two weeks in Hong Kong in the fall of  2007. It was before Beijing worked to clean up the air for the Olympics in 2008 and the air was stifling, hot, heavy, and red-orange.  No matter what, I have to be outside, so I would stroll along the harbor, but one day I met a man in the elevator in the hotel where we were staying.  He said he never went outside. The hotel was connected to a shopping mall. He lived in the hotel, and worked from where he lived. Shopping, movies, entertainment could all be reached without going outside.  I understand we are adaptable beings but I wonder if I could adapt to that.

On the other hand, I’m re-reading Frank Okstaseski’s wonderful book, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully.  It’s true that our world will most likely narrow with age.  The book is about embracing impermanence, the living and dying happening all the time.

I’m struck by an image he shares. He used to live in a hundred-year old farmhouse.  The window panes looked solid but then he realized the glass was thicker at the bottom of the frame than at the top.  Even glass is fluid.

In case you’re interested, the five invitations are:

-Don’t Wait

-Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing

-Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience

-Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things

-Cultivate Don’t Know Mind

With that, I’m working with the Alexander Technique, reminding myself to pause and consciously come forward with my head and rise when I come up, and use my ankles, knee, and hip joints when I come down.  I’m working with fluidity, honoring resilience in my being as delicate and precious as glass.

I’m honoring the forty muscles in my tongue. It’s a composite muscle, like a composite flower, and I honor the complexity and flexibility I am.

I watch my cats now, watch and feel them breathe, all the way through. I’m learning to release the jaw and throat, to release the head upward rather than down, which doesn’t mean lifting from above but allowing the head to rise, honoring the fullness of the neck which reaches up to the skull at the occiput.  

The neck is longer than we may realize, and it’s strength and resilience allows our head to bobble.  Practice bobbling, and move with the flexibility of a snake into the wonder of a new moment, a new day.

This moment will never come again.

Embrace, and be embraced, in rise and fall.

It’s Saturday in August, vacation time, and there’s a scent of fall, a shift in the light, morning light later, evening dark earlier. I feel the shift inside. 

I woke this morning from dreams that were rich, inviting, exciting.  In my dreams, I walked across a multitude of bridges rising steeply like the initial climb of a roller coaster. I looked off to the side though there was no railing, and all was blue water and sky and tall sailing ships flowing by.  

Even in the dream, it felt like a dream, like Oz.  Flowers opened their petaled hands, and then, knowing it was time to go home, I entered a small boat and motored across the sea to wake in my bed with Tiger snuggled close to me.  

I lay there, stretched on inner guidance, felt acupuncture from within.   

This upcoming Full Moon is the Sturgeon Full Moon in honor of the freshwater fish that filled rivers and lakes in North America before overfishing, pollution, and damage to their habitat destroyed their numbers.

Out hiking with two friends many years ago I saw what I thought was a sturgeon making its way up Redwood Creek.  I questioned when I read today that sturgeon are freshwater fish, but then I learn we have White Sturgeon on the Pacific coast and they move between ocean and freshwater but not with the consistency of salmon and steelhead.  

I think the sturgeon I saw was the Jonathan Livingston Seagull of the Sturgeon World.

And that brings me to this, a wonderful philosophy for today and everyday.

WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING TODAY DO IT WITH THE CONFIDENCE OF A 4 YEAR OLD IN A BATMAN T-SHIRT.

The fog is always different here.  It floats in and out and sometimes disappears but today it moves like a leopard, the sky peeking through like reverse spots. The spots on leopards are called rosettes because they resemble the shape of a rose. Fog spots open and close, as they come together and let go.

Now the fog momentarily changes course. It lines up like a spine.  

I’m very aware of my own spine because I’ve now had two Alexander Technique sessions.  I chose to begin this work because I realized we are living in times where we have to speak.  I need to loosen up my vocal cords, release my throat and neck and look around like an animal on the savanna emerging from the woods. I need to be clear on predator and prey, and nourish my energy for pouncing strength.  

This morning I’m with this quote from Anne Frank:

“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes… Families are torn apart: men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.” 

And it’s happening here, in this country, in 2019. 

I was speaking with a friend from Toastmasters this week.  I left the club a few years ago to focus on my book.

My friend said the club is now filled with people in their forties which is good as our club was on the elderly side but she said these younger people don’t know history we lived through and take for granted.

They didn’t live through the Vietnam era. They didn’t watch the news every night on TV, the same news that everyone in the country watched.  They didn’t eat dinner seeing body bags coming home. They didn’t live when there was a draft so the military was made up of a range of backgrounds and ethnicities.  Everyone was invested in whether their draft number was high or low.

Eliminating the draft changed the composition of the military, and in addition, war has become, even more dramatically, a money-making enterprise. Blackwater, a privately owned military company, makes money paying mercenaries to fight without allegiance to ethics or cause.

Today the photo of Melania holding a baby orphaned in the mass shooting in El Paso is shocking.  She and Trump are smiling as he does a thumbs-up. Thumbs up for what? What can they be thinking?  What don’t they understand?  

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar, shares this today in his daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation.  He is encouraging each of us to honor our inner mystic, bring it forth. 

Episcopal priest Matthew Fox writes:

The crises we find ourselves in as a species require that as a species we shake up all our institutions—including our religious ones—and reinvent them. Change is necessary for our survival, and we often turn to the mystics at critical times like this. Jung said: “Only the mystics bring creativity into religion.” Jesus was a mystic shaking up his religion and the Roman empire; Buddha was a mystic who shook up the prevailing Hinduism of his day; Gandhi was a mystic shaking up Hinduism and challenging the British Empire; and Martin Luther King, Jr. shook up his tradition and America’s segregationist society. The mystics walk their talk and talk (often in memorable poetic phraseology) their walk.

Rohr writes that Howard Thurman (1900–1981) was “a mystic who sought to make peace between religions and founded the first major interracial, interfaith church in the United States, urged people to “listen for the sound of the genuine.” Rohr shares excerpts from one of Thurman’s talks.

There is something in everyone of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you can not hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born. . . .

Sometimes there is so much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals . . . and you are buffeted by these and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? . . .

Now there is something in everybody that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in other people. . . . I must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine in you. . . .

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music. 


I have wanted to avoid politics on this blog, but when I asked my friend how she brought Vietnam into Toastmasters where politics is forbidden, she said Vietnam was not a political issue.  It was a moral one.

When Rodin conceived a sculpture that would depict the poet Dante, he didn’t realize it would evolve beyond representing Dante to representing all poets and creators. May we do the same!

This morning I’m with two things, this quote by Toni Morrison: If you want to fly, you have to give up things that weigh you down.

And David Brooks, an opinion columnist in the New York Times writing about Marianne Williamson and how she is the one to beat Trump with her message which is an uprising of decency.  Wow!

We’re ripe for change, and yes, a return to decency, ethics, and morality, a return to speaking openly of love and how we’re wired to care. We thrive on connection.

Yesterday, my intention was to spend time with Rodin’s sculptures at the Legion of Honor.  Reading about how he worked spirit into clay had me inspired to again visit his work but then the fog around the Legion led me down steps, many steps, to the beach, and rocks that seem like animals held still and a low tide that revealed starfish, or sea stars, as they are otherwise known, and anemone waiting patiently for the return of the sea.  

I love the summer fog, its wrap of mystery, mysticism, and mist.  It opens dreams.

I’m both fuzzy and clear this morning.  My sense is that I’m wrapped in a cocoon and there’s clarity in the cocoon, well, not clarity so much as trust, that this is a momentary resting place where I dismantle, dissolve, and reassemble, honoring presence along the way.

I sit with fear, fear that one could go to a shopping mall and be shot, and I know in truth that something can always happen, so this fear is irrational, and yet it’s there.  And I go even further with my scenario. Would I be the one killed, injured, or the one left behind, and what does any of that mean in terms of my living, being, doing, this moment, this day?

I can make myself crazy or I can honor that we never know and so it is to be present, present, present, and in this moment, I’m happily ensconced in a cocoon of some semblance of a body, and some wrapping of a home that’s surrounded by plants I care for as they care for me.

Breath moves in and out.  I am the sea.