The ocean is one of my special places. My plan is to have my ashes scattered there. Perhaps honoring each wave, so unique, yet part of the whole is what guides me as though I know I have lived more of my life than remains to come, this is the time to integrate and prepare for that final crash or gentle meeting of the shore where water dissolves and lifts.
The little wren is sitting patiently on her nest waiting for her eggs to hatch. She was busy building it, and now, she sits, and when the chicks hatch, she’ll be busy again. Meanwhile, either she or her mate chirp away.
I sit between, on, above, and below the notes.
I received sad news this morning. My younger cousin has pancreatic cancer and will begin chemotherapy. Where do I put this information in the melody and harmony of the day? The metronome is so precious in its song, a song beating with my heart and the larger heart we share.
Yesterday I read an article on how to respond to another in need. We ask: Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged? Of course, hugs are preferably done in person though we do send them through space on the internet.
And right now, a ding, and I receive a text of an emoji of two kitties hugging with a heart above, and then, an explanation from my beloved niece.
I was at a retreat recently for work and the somatic instructor said we need 4 hugs a day for survival, 8 hugs a day for maintenance, and 12 hugs a day for growth
And the best part is that our nervous system doesn’t differentiate between a hug from someone else and a hug from ourselves
So hope we can all hug ourself today
I embrace her hope and send it to you and to me. May we all reverberate in and celebrate a loving circle of care.
Birds are tweeting in the early morning light as I reflect on these words from Joanna Macy in “Positive Disintegration”.
We can place the self between our ears and have it looking out from our eyes, or we can widen it to include the air we breathe, or at other moments we can cast its boundaries farther to include the oxygen-giving trees and plankton, our external lungs, and beyond them the web of life in which they are sustained.
Our family gathered on a ranch 1000 feet above Half Moon Bay to celebrate Steve’s 75th birthday.
Yesterday I saw an egret standing like a sentry in an open field where once there was a Chevron. There are signposts everywhere.
Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
And there’s John O’Donohue:
Fluent
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
I woke this morning, aware of interdependence. What freedom there is in that. I’m not here by myself. I’m supported by trees, air, breath, you, me. We don’t do this alone. We live in support.
Br. David Steindl-Rast:
The challenge before us is this: to treasure and preserve the independence given to us and learn to integrate it in an all-embracing interdependence.
I woke this morning, feeling shaken, like small earthquakes were moving through me. I rose as though shaking sand out of my clothes after being at the beach.
This week my Tergar meditation is focused on The Wisdom of Multiplicity. The more I feel multiplicity in myself, the more I feel it in the world, and in that, comes a deep appreciation of the preciousness of being here, and the awareness of how we’re continuously balancing on a beam of life and death.
ETTY HILLESUM:
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
Etty was murdered in Auschwitz on 30 November 1943. She was 29.
She inspires in demonstrating how to meet what comes from an inner core of support that doesn’t judge or divide into good and bad.
From Walt Whitman, Song of Myself:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
As a child, on Memorial Day, we went to Bedford, Indiana and laid flowers on family graves. Flags flew on the graves of the veterans, placed there by my uncle who fought in WWII. His father fought in WWI. My father was a pilot of a B-17 shot down in WWII. Lives, memories, honoring in a desire for no more wars, for coming together to solve and honor the complexity each of us is, in a world complex, and in that complexity, whole.
Recognizing the multitudes of which I consist, I hope on this Memorial Day we can come to peace in ourselves and the world. It’s a time to honor what’s come before as we use it as a launching pad to honor the dead by living in peace.
Yesterday I was at Bedwell Bayfront Park with my three and a half year old grandson and his dad. I was watching him ride his new bicycle, a bike complete with hand brakes and a kickstand.
When I told him I needed to go to the bank and invited him to go with me, he said, “Toad Hall”, and I was stymied with the connection until I realized he loves the book Wind in the Willows, and his only knowledge of a ‘bank” is the river bank in the book. I’m not sure he was impressed with the interior of a financial institution, but everyone was friendly, and there was a bowl of tootsie roll pops which he was not allowed to take. It was a good reminder of the complexity in language, and what we visualize and hear.
A friend, Ben Parker passed away easily this week, his sense of humor and incredible intellect still intact. He was 102. His last words were “the dewdrop slips into the shiny sea.”
“The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”
Comforted by that, I open Yehuda Amichai’s poetry book Open, Closed, Open. to the ending of a poem in a section on The Language of Love and Tea with Roasted Almonds.
And there’s all that talk about Till death do us part,
Even death will not part us, it will bind us
somewhere in the universe
in a new encounter that has no end.
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