This weekend I pause, reflect, and connect the present which encompasses honoring the past and what we create now.
This morning I was drinking my coffee looking out the window at the redwood tree which is one at the base and rises as two. I watched a squirrel scamper up, then, turn around, and perch in the sun. When I went to get my camera I figured he or she would be gone, but there was my friend still there even as I opened the door and went outside.
A good friend passed unexpectedly on Wednesday. I was surprised when her daughter and husband led Sensory Awareness today in her place. She was meant to lead today and clearly she was on the Zoom call as we experienced when we shared.
Her husband led something that sounds simple and yet is profound. I offer it now.
After coming to quiet, come to standing. Using your dominant hand, write in the air the name of the person who passed and your own name, and see and feel what happens. Give yourself at least ten minutes for this.
You may end up using both hands, and writing large or small. Creativity. Guidance. Trust.
I won’t share my experience, only offer the invitation as a way to heal and connect with someone who has passed, or maybe someone who is still “here”.
Today we shared the kindness, generosity, creativity, and joy with which this woman lived. We connected in the heart-opening warmth and sharing of tears, memories, and breath.
Velcro was patented in 1958. I discovered it in the 70’s as a wonder for children’s shoes. Spiderman and Superman shoes were easily entered and clasped.
Dave Barry said, “Your modern teenager is not about to listen to advice from an old person, defined as a person who remembers when there was no Velcro.”
Certainly now there’s a different parameter for listening to those who lived before computers, the internet, or smartphones. How is knowledge categorized? Where is wisdom found?
I resonate to Rumi:
Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
And Brother David Steindl-Rast:
It’s not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.
And these two dogs, rescue greyhounds, who earned a living and now savor retirement with ecstatic motion and gratitude, though in this moment they capture the ease and joy of repose.
The Northern Lights, Auroras, were seen even in San Francisco last night. It seams a sign of the oneness we share as caressed with light, we mother ourselves, each other, and the planet we share.
The fog is a soft presence this morning as I view photos of the Northern Lights which though near, I didn’t see them right here. Instead, I watched an interview of Jane Hirshfield with Michael Lerner at Commonweal and was deeply touched with inner light.
The interview concludes with her reading Little Soul poems, written to her first love as she accompanied him as he was dying.
Her wonderful poems are in her latest book The Asking.
Little soul,
you and I will become
the memory
of a memory of a memory.
A horse
released of the traces
forgets the weight of the wagon.
I was at the Farmer’s Market yesterday so we’re feasting on abundance: asparagus, strawberries, peaches, and blueberries. The visit reminds me of the work of producing, planting, harvesting, and bringing nourishment closer to me. I’m fed by a hard-working and intricate web of connection.
Wednesday morning I was at the Bayside Cafe for breakfast. A little boy about three or four emerged from the bathroom with his father, and the child was saying “Happiness”. He then walked through the restaurant and out the door repeating “happiness, happiness, happiness” with a slight pause between each word. I’m carrying that with me, such an ease-filled way to be and ripple in the world.
As Cheri Huber shares:
When you think you’re the center of the universe, you’re a misery. When you realize you’re the center of the universe, you’re a blessing.
I read these words of Richard Rohr and feel the long neck of immersion and experience, the fluidity, strength, and agility of birds on land and in flight. His words are ballast, support, inspiration, and guide.
Going to the deepest level of communication,
Where back and forth has never stopped.
Where I am not the initiator but the transmission wire itself.
— Richard Rohr
My son and his wife are in Paris celebrating her 50th birthday. Today they were in Giverny strolling through Claude Monet’s home, and water and flower gardens.
I was in San Rafael by the wildlife ponds.
I’m struck by this quote and invite my voice to reveal my immersion in and reception of the breath.
From Philip Shepherd’s book Radical Wholeness.
A person’s voice is like an MRI that reveals immediately how much of her body is available to the breath—and so, too, how much of her being is available to the Present. When the body is liberated from its divisions, it becomes a fluid medium through the entirety of which the breath travels like a wave. Like a living graph, the voice reveals the progress of the breath through the body—and the ways in which the body blocks that progress—to everyone within earshot… If you crave sensation and awareness, you don’t need a magnet in your finger to provide it. The whole of the world lives through you, expressing itself in an avalanche of sensations within. If you could find your way back home to the body, to the breath, to yourself, you would liberate your awareness into the realm of a felt mystery from which you can learn in ways limited only by your willingness to attend to it.
This morning we were awakened by a little bird singing into the camera placed outside. At the Chandler Nature Center, a part of Phoenix, we saw white ducks, a coot, and a Great Blue Heron. It’s a time of unfolding, a living birth.
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