Posted on by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Going Home

In going through my journals, I come across these words and this experience by Dawn Prince-Hughes.  She has Aspergers.  In wanting to understand human communication, she began sitting outside the window of the enclosure for the silverback gorillas at the Seattle zoo.  One day she arrived upset. Congo, a silverback male gorilla noticed and rushed to the window.  He motioned to her to put her head on his shoulder. They touched through the glass and felt the glass as fluid.

She says: I probably stayed with him like that, with my head on his shoulder, for 30 minutes or so. I think it was probably the first time I was genuinely comforted by another person. Congo really set the standard for what social interactions should be like between me and another human being.  You just can’t worry about looking like a fool. You can’t worry about getting hurt. You can’t worry about whether you’re right or not. It just boils down to wanting to be connected at all costs, at all risks. I no longer wanted to allow the permeability of my spirit to seek smaller and smaller shelters. It requires a completely open heart. I felt like I found a way to go home through the glass.  

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Rounding About

Our book group formed many years ago around a love of Jane Austen and Dickens though the first book we read was Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Discussing that book, we learned more about each other than people we’d known for years.  We knew we’d found something, at least some of us.  There were seven of us on the first trip to England.  A friend just asked about the book group trip so I go through a photo album and snap photos through plastic to find a few of our first trip. 

Our second trip, minus one member who passed away the year before, we spent a week on a canal boat which was quite an adventure.  We were the entertainment as we navigated through narrow locks with a 70 foot boat.  We spent the second week on a walking trip through the Cotswolds followed by time in London.  

This friend asks what I’m looking for in going back through the past.  I respond that I’m circling back to remember with reverence this life I’ve been given.  I’m preparing for my transition which could be now, or twenty or thirty years from now, but I see and feel this as a time to gather and honor all I’ve been given, as I circle and center in Heart, Essence, Source.  

Sally drove our rental van and provided a container to hold luggage for six!
“Oh, who could ever tire of Bath?”
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May Day

This morning I’m listening to one bird in particular who is a joyous eruption of chirps and song.  Last night we realized there is a nest on the lamp next to the door down below.  One year a nest was built into the dryer vent.  Another year a nest with eggs rested on top of the electrical box.  With the pandemic, we didn’t drive the outside car and when we opened the hood to charge the battery, there was a perfect little nest, now empty.  This year the nest is right outside a door we use daily, but it seems we’re cleared as safe.  

I think the critters have a sign like hoboes used to mark a place for food.  Our Welcome Here Mat is out.   

Steve sits on the deck down below at night and a skunk or two wander by, an opossum, and sometimes raccoons.  Certainly the squirrels are year-round residents, and at night Steve listens to an owl as he exchanges calls with two other birds.  

Life here is peaceful.  

I’m reading Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins. He shares his family move from San Francisco to Hay-on-Wye in Wales, a town with forty bookstores.  

When my book group went to England, we went to Hay-on-Wye, “the book capital of the world”.  We spent time in Bath in honor of Jane Austen, and time in Stratford on Avon for Shakespeare, and there I found Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters.

Books and birds delight this first day of May.   

The California poppies are in bloom
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Gifts

I rise early this morning, and go outside to see the early morning alignment of four planets.  Stars are sparkling through the redwood tree like Christmas lights, and then across the southern sky, I see a shooting star. 

Crickets are chirping and soon the birds begin.  

Yesterday we were at the Children’s Discovery Museum with our grandchild – another gift.

And not just a gift of our grandchild, but the gift of children exploring, climbing, playing, sharing. 

It’s the last day of April and tomorrow is May 1st, May Day.  As a child, on this day, we made baskets and filled them with candy and flowers to hang on neighbor’s doorknobs to celebrate the longer days.

I’m still going through paperwork from the past.  I come across my certificates for “graduating” from chemotherapy, and then radiation.  Both certificates are signed by the nurses who cared for me.  I give thanks.  

May we each feel and fill with delight like May baskets. May we savor what sings around us on earth and in the sky.

The Golden Gate
Looking across to San Francisco
Scented Coyote Bush with Ladybugs
The Big Climb
The Builder
The Musician

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

This Time of Year

I gather quotes like flowers, inhale, exhale, the freshness of words vibrating in spring air.

Hildegard of Bingen: “You are a flowering orchard.”

How clear that seems in spring.  There’s one particular bird – a little guy who sings and chirps continuously from one tree and then another.   His song wraps around me, entwines, dissolving what divides.  

Carl Jung: Where insight rules beyond differences, all the pairs of opposites come together.

Rilke: Do not be bewildered by the surfaces – in the depths all becomes law.  

Rumi: Open your hands if you want to be held.  

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: He lives most life whoever breathes most air.  

Marion Woodman: The crone is the maturing of the feminine, in both men and women. Here, there is no concern with power, nothing left to lose. The crone finds herself a tuning fork among others, bringing them into center.

Can this tiny singing bird be a crone? I center in the sounds.

Annie Dillard asks, What does it feel like to be alive? And answers: Living, you stand under a waterfall.

Morning
Section of the redwood trunk sans squirrel in the moment
Orchids pour like waterfalls

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Gifts

My posts may seem unusual for a while as I’m going back through writing from twenty-five years ago.  What was I exploring?  I was learning that allowing myself to be received is an act of giving, so here I am.  Receive.  

I asked myself “questions as bait”, as ways to wake.  Try it.  It’s fun!

Questions as Bait

How do I hang rainbows from the sun?

How do lips climb?

How do I fold and unfold my heart – origami sails for sea and sky? 

How do I lick the sky like blueberry pie?

How do I empower joy, and lift my heart on a bench to look out at the world from a cloud?

Can I be like anemone,

fed from air, like sea? 

I said to myself each day:  I am a commitment to birthing a focus for my life each moment, each day,  a changing lens knowing that for the Dalai Lama, and therefore for what I intend, kindness and awareness are the same thing.

At the time, I came upon a young boy loading fish from a stream into a cooler.  He then carried the cooler with the fish up the stream to a pond he had dug.  He was trying to save the fish from the usual summer drought.  I think of intention, beauty, kindness, diversity, survival.  

I would have forgotten this episode if I hadn’t written it down on paper, a layer received from a tree.  

When my niece was young, she waltzed her semi-personally created character through Toon Town on the computer.  I could see her hand-eye coordination creating new pathways in the brain, and activating what may lie dormant in me.  It was like learning a new language, an opportunity to interact with others in a virtual, and yet, emotionally satisfying way.  

Now, she, too, is a lens for me, as I turn the kaleidoscope of my life round and round.

Turning round and round, turned

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Learning

T.H. White set his book The Once and Future King, a book about King Arthur, in a different time period than what we historically and mythically know.  He used Le Morte d’Arthur, as a source, though he re-interprets it from the perspective of a world recovering from World War II. What advice might he give?

In the book, this is the advice Merlyn gives Arthur.

“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your house trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn.  Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

Keep turning and churning as blades response to wind
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Leadership

I‘m going through journals and notes from the past with intention to release and not store, collect, hide, and neglect. How do I open to what’s here, and step more firmly, clearly, and lightly into my own life?

I’m inspired by Sir Laurens van der Post. Living from 1906 to 1996, he was a writer, farmer, soldier, political adviser to British prime ministers, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer, and conservationist.

He wrote:

“The age of the leaders has come and gone. Every person must be their own leader now. You must remove the projection, and contain the spirit of the time in your own life and your own nature, because to go the old way and follow your leader is a form of psychological imprisonment.” 

He watched the Bushmen and wrote: “Art, poetry, and music are matters of survival. They are guardians and makers of the unbroken chain of what’s oldest and first in the human spirit.”

What calls us here?

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Embrace

Joan Halifax:

We derive nourishment from our ancestral past. In a Ute song, it is said, “In our bones is the rock itself, in our blood is the river, our skin contains the shadow of every living thing we ever came across. This is what we brought with us long ago.

We are the sum of our ancestors. Our roots stretch back to blue-green algae; they stretch to the stars. They ultimately reach the void.

Between the great original emptiness, the ancestral void, and the body that reads these words, there stand numberless generations of inorganic and organic forms. As geological history is written on a canyon wall, this history is inscribed on our psyches.

Silence and solitude enjoin us to remember our whole and great body.

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Softening

Yesterday Tiger’s spirit passed over the Rainbow Bridge.  I see how the term comes from the light of passing shining through our tears.

Today I feel a softening in the grief as though my heart is melting like butter. 

A friend reminds me of all that happened in my life while Tiger and Bella were here.  Tiger really never came back to himself after Bella passed, so the vet said this could be grief for the loss of his womb mate that led to yesterday.  He is at peace.

Tiger

The cat in charge of the office of the vet