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 rise at 4:45. Tiger wants to go out. All is silent, no wind, only a wrap of fog. Light comes and birds begin to call and the boom of the fog horn pours through.
I’m on my way to Muir Beach, then up the coast to Pt. Reyes Station for a dharma talk on trees and then a walk on the beach with two friends.
This moment seems a place to put words in a bin and roll them to the curb.
Silence rolls through my bones. Fog rests, and even as I type, it moves, and the ridge begins to reveal. I see another layer of trees.
The Mill Valley marsh near where I live was saved because the endangered Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse lives here. I was strolling along the marsh today enjoying the water, egrets, and plants: cordgrass, saltgrass and pickleweed when my friend Will bicycled up. Will was born here almost fifty years ago and equals Google in his array of knowledge.
I thought I knew the area as regards our native people, the Coast Miwok, but today I learn I’m near a midden where Chief Marin lived. The discarded clam shells are known to be from his time because that particular variety of clam no longer exists here in the bay. Will tells me where to find the midden and I do.
I also learn that the Army Corps of Engineers is looking into solutions for the problem of flooding that’s occurring because of climate change. The proposal is to remove concrete walls and replace them with nature’s filtering system – cordgrass, pickleweed, and saltgrass. That will give us 50 to 100 years.
I love that nature gives us answers we need. She’s shining brightly today, and inside and out, I refresh on finding what I need right here where I live.
Last night the half moon increased the gold in its light as it moved across the darkening, then, black clear sky. This morning fog rests momentarily on the ridge It dips down into the valley as though licking a spoonful of sweet before it dissolves.
I watch and understand transition, embrace and release as I dip and sip this moving change of form, this transformation of matter to air. I appreciate the gift in not knowing when that final sip will come.
Yesterday Marlene and I took the train from San Rafael to Santa Rosa. It’s called a Smart train which is ironic since it’s path is too short to be of much use to commuters who sit stopped on the freeway as the train moves along passing tidal ponds, pools, and marsh filled with parent and baby birds.
It’s a landscape of aliveness, and aliveness sparks inside the train too, as separate lives unite in moving along past hills, trees, parking lots, businesses, and homes. As seniors we have special pricing and seats, and I appreciate that as I sit erect, representing youth in maturity, as garbed in my years, I could be wearing diamonds, silk, velvet, and lace, rather than sandals, sweater and pants. My spine stacks erect, wisdom represented in the grace of unknowing aligned.
We exit the train and walk, turning this way and that, to a restaurant Marlene found on-line when she Googled patio seating. We arrive to learn the outside seating is full.
Well, there is an advantage to the look of disappointment on faces our age so we are quickly ushered to a private garden where leaves are brushed off a small table to be replaced with cloth napkins, water, tableware, and bread. Our attentive waiter brings us all we need, including a finale of cannoli as delicate and airy as the fog I view now.
At the table, Marlene hands me a copy of the poem “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe. She offers it as support for my brother’s passing. I wait to read it until I get home as I prefer not to show emotion in public.
Yesterday I walked to a friend’s house. I usually walk through the parkaware of destination. Yesterday I was stunned to see, truly see the path to the park. I didn’t even walk all the way into the park, too absorbed with all there was to see and be, so I walked partway in, sat, walked back. Today I think of veins, the teeny-tiniest ones, each filled with journey and path.
My sensory awareness group met today. As I settled into myself and felt the support of the floor and the chair, a tear came and rolled down my cheek. My throat felt tight and scratchy and I began to cough. Grief extended into my heart and down to my feet.
I shared that I was experiencing a visceral feeling of grief from my brother’s death on April 14th. I had hoped I’d moved on.
Later, a woman who’d just completed a workshop at Spirit Rock on death, dying and aging asked if I thought what I was feeling related “just” to my brother’s death. I knew that it was more than that. She suggested that my feelings related to impermanence.
I could feel how true that was.
Later we worked with flexibility using partly inflated balls. I felt my holding and inflexibility. I was trying to hold a stance of strength. I felt the work of holding back tears, what it does to my legs, neck, and spine.
What I learned today is that flexibility and impermanence relate and when I can honor the waves of both, float a little more openly on the natural movement I am, I can breathe, and tears may come, but in and through the tears there are waves, and released, I breathe, and am breathed.
Allowing immersion in impermanence, I hold both joy and sorrow, no dividing, and there I celebrate the wonder of being alive. Vitality is my wand and spring when I honor that impermanence is the ocean and land we share. There’s nothing to do and nowhere to go. I’m here.
The fog is a tight wrap this first Sunday in July, and yet I wake thinking of sunflowers.
Yesterday I learned two friends lost their siblings. One lost her twin.
I’ve stopped counting the days since my brother passed, months now, but found myself expanding out into loss, into an ability to be a circle of petals rather than a tightly held bud of pain and grief.
Last week I joined Steve in his Alexander Technique session. In my first attempt to come down and sit on a stool, I felt fear still held in my knees from the accident where I broke bones in both feet and couldn’t walk. I find myself wanting to honor all that is true for me – fear, grief, anger, love. I want to receive the changes as they come.
May this be so for this collection of matter animated spirit today.
Love, Peace, and Ease.
Sunflowers share a vase – come together and part
Mergansers at the marsh – photo by Bob Dresser, recently passed away
Because the fog is in today, I look into the eyes of sunflowers. At first, I’m entranced by their petals but then I focus in more closely and what do I see – infinity.
For the celebration of Interdependence, we gathered as a family at my son Jeff and his wife Jan’s home in San Jose. Their home and yard are serene with Senna, a loving rescue greyhound, a garden and view of open land. A short walk to the top of a nearby hill opens up a vista that is the perfect place to watch firework displays from all over the South Bay. Last night, the Fourth of July, I swiveled my head like an owl trying to catch each wondrous opening of color and sparks.
The crescent moon turned golden as it began to sink into the now smoky, as though saged, evening air. The moon felt close, like a guardian, a harbinger of hope. The gathering on the hill consisted of a variety of ages and languages. Children wore headbands of light and ran around freely, no fear.
Today I sink into the truth of interdependence, bounced as though in a hammock to my cells opening to the cells of plants, recognizing the value in the difference in our cell walls. I sink into silence and stillness; receive.
In that, I suggest with kindness that only senility can explain someone stating that the army took over airports in 1775. Such a person needs mental health care.
Home now, loaded with produce from Jeff and Jan’s gardens, I give thanks for abundance in my life, and recognition of, and celebration of change.
Summer hills of gold viewed from Jeff and Jan’s yard
Buddha nests in the gazebo, harvesting and merging dark and light
