Posted on by Cathy Edgett

The Moon

Last night I sat outside with the stars waiting for the moon.  I felt pulled upward and outward by the vastness.  What is it that one person plans to murder other people? How can we speak of regulating women’s bodies, and allow no regulation of guns?

I’m up early, again pulled by the light of the moon.

The state of CA has a $97 billion dollar surplus.  Imagine if that money was used for education and infrastructure.  Imagine if every child was given the gift of a Vision Quest, a week on their own in nature, a week alone learning the  gift of survival and connection, the gift of looking up at the stars.

In the essay Spring by Gretel Ehrlich, she wrote: 

“I think about the eagle. How big she was, how each time she spread her wings it was like a thought stretching between two seasons.”

Surely we can stretch our thoughts like the wings of an eagle, like butterflies fluttering in air, like the relationship between sun, moon, earth and stars.  

Lichen growing on a rock, showing the purity of the air

Abundance – CA Poppies

Step into the orchid, petals like wings

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

The Birds are Singing

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi: I don’t know anything about consciousness. I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing.

I don’t know if I’m hearing better or if there are more birds singing this year but all seems alive with the songs and flight of birds and displays of flowers.

Photos from along the marsh.

Skatepark for the “kids”

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Tending Layers of Change

Even immersed in the blossoming and birth of spring, I’m aware of grief.  A card comes, honoring the lives and passing of Tiger and Bella.  Others have passed.  I’m in a place of deep feeling, and in that place is gratitude.

I read these words by Bhante Sumano, from “One Thing for Sure”:

As Buddhist practitioners, we aim to let go of our attachments. At first, grieving for something or someone we’ve lost may look like clinging, but it’s actually a process of acknowledging our loss, which allows us to heal from the pain and loosen our grip on the past.

I’m not a Buddhist practitioner, though I have intention for non-attachment and living a philosophy of acceptance and trust by responding with “Is that so? 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem, “Seascape Near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer” continues her examination of living with grief.  Vincent Van Gogh writes to his brother Theo about the sea.

It’s always changing.

You can’t even tell if it’s blue because

a second later the changing light 

has taken on a pink or gray tinge. 

It wasn’t very cheery but neither was it sad 

It was beautiful. 

And isn’t grief the same, complex and always changing, allowing us to live even more deeply in the layers within us, the layers of soil, rivers, trees, and sea.  

Stephen Levine: To heal is to touch with love that which was previously touched with fear.

The Poem:

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2022/05/14/seascape-near-les-saintes-maries-de-la-mer/
Posted on by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Spring

Yesterday I was sitting outside on the deck, tilting my head back to swallow the sun, when I first heard, and then saw, her.

My small wren friend was hopping on the rail of the deck, then, bending to check the spider webs hanging between the rails.  When I read that wrens eat spiders, I stopped sweeping the webs away, though I understand that clarity is good feng shui, and now, I see her hop, hop, hopping along, bending over to check each web for a treat. 

She reminds me to breathe more deeply, to see more clearly, to honor clarity with the webs that twine.

She leaves her nest when I come out

Young redwood and old

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Expanse

It is said when someone dies we lose a library.  A friend passed away Monday night.

I reflect on his gifts, on what he leaves.  He was a gatherer and creator of community.  He loved to cook and garden and offer those gifts, bringing together the wider community we share.

I read these words of Simone Weil, To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. I think of how he was rooted, and now, physicality dropped, essence expands and soars.

I’m still cleaning out “stuff”, perhaps will be until I pass.  Today, going through papers, I read Etty Hillesum, who in 1943, was deported and murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp.

She wrote: Every day I shall put my papers in order and every day I shall say farewell.  And the real farewell, when it comes, will only be a small outward confirmation of what has been accomplished within me from day to day.

My small wren friend continues to tend to her nest.  I think of what it is to be one of her eggs, so cared for within the shell, and soon there will be tiny chirps as walls pecked through, drop away, and tiny beings learn to fly through air, fragrant and clear, and buoyed with plant and animal exchange.

As Jack Kornfield says: Those who are awake live in a constant state of amazement.

May we all live amazed.  

Wren friend is flitting and hovering as she watches me

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Connection

I continue through my archaeological dig, what I’ve collected over the years.

I come to these wondrous words of William Stafford.

If you don’t know the kind of person I am 
and I don’t know the kind of person you are 
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world 
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, 
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break 
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood 
storming out to play through the broken dyke. 

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail, 
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park, 
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty 
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. 

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, 
a remote important region in all who talk: 
though we could fool each other, we should consider– 
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. 

For it is important that awake people be awake, 
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; 
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe– 
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep. 

Doris Day rose blooming today
Mother’s Day Bouquet

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

The Original Mothers’ Day

Heather Cox Richardson gives the history of this day.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-7-2022?s=r

If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.

And here we are again, pulling anchors from the past

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Mother’s Day Weekend

Birth is happening all around us.  Mother Earth is springing to life.  For those of us whose mothers have passed, there’s a bit of sadness in the weekend celebration and there’s also the knowing that life continues even as we release those we love.

I feel my ribs as they float the canoe of my being, heart stable and expansive in its ability to curve and flow pumping in and out.

I just finished a book by Jeanne Achterberg, Woman as Healer.  From prehistoric times to the present, there’s been peace, growth, and prosperity  when women were honored and revered for their role as healers and creators, as essential beings in this world we share.  When they were held down, dishonored, and demeaned, there was war.

I’d not realized the numbers of women burned at the stake during the Middle Ages.  Women were feared for their knowledge of herbs and healing, and destroyed.   

A neighbor shares that ten monarch butterflies just hatched from milkweed she planted.  What a gift as we honor and acknowledge we each have our own right to choose how we best serve, nourish and create.  

Early Morning

Now

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Tender

Otter at Play

Today I’m with what it is to support another, to be a tender, a boat or larger ship that serves and supports other ships.  Perhaps it’s easy for a ship’s captain to know what is needed, but when it comes to helping others it becomes more complex.

How do we help another?  How are we a tender to another’s needs?

There are times where our hearts may ache to “do” something and yet, sometimes less is more, and so we stay quietly with our own pain and grief, and allow its expansion into a wider world.  There, there is more embrace than we can even know, so each moment open out with ease and grace to all that is here and shared. 

Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.

– Confucius

The fog comes in

Spider webbing a rose

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

What’s Happening Here

As I sort through years of accumulation of poems, wisdom, inspiration, I feel an energetic shift in the room, a spaciousness in the room and in myself. As I organize, recycle, and toss, I think of how a fire needs space to burn.  When we make a fire, we leave space around and between the logs.  There is a foundation, a plan, and with that these words of Seneca swirl in with direction, warmth, and light .  

If we don’t know what port we’re steering for, no wind is favorable.

Meanwhile the little bird chirps from her nest from morning to night.  I feel accompanied by her chirps as she sits on her nest. Her nest is below this room in which I sit. She makes the world seem balanced and right.

I wrote the above last night and then this morning I come to Robert B. Hubbell and what the overturning of Roe vs. Wade means to all of us.  It’s just the beginning of erosion and destruction of our rights, rights so painfully won.

Then I read this poem by Susan Vespoli, “Twenty Photos from Police Records of His Last Night Alive”.   She’s writing about her son.  She says about the poem:

“This past week, I received photos and body-cam video from police records of my son Adam’s last night on the planet before he was shot by a police officer. Adam and three other homeless individuals, one in a wheelchair, one leaning on a cane, were charged with a misdemeanor for ‘obstructing streets or public areas.’ Because my son questioned the police’s right to arrest them for sleeping, he was thrown to the ground, charged with ‘resisting arrest’ and hauled into jail for the night. The next day, he was shot. I am writing to give a voice to all the human beings who sleep without homes and who are treated this way.”

You can read the poem here: https://www.rattle.com

Little Bird on Her Nest