Inspired by space and earth.
Inspiration
Peace Tickled by Ease
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, there’s mist and green, and birds chirping and tweeting in greeting and meeting.
Late afternoon yesterday a Great Blue Heron swept over our heads as we sat outside. Later, I heard a noise and went outside to check. It was the moon. The moon wasn’t rising noisily. Our neighbor was pulling garbage cans up to the street, but it brought me out to the beauty happening right here, this moving light, an orb brightening the sky as the earth turns and journeys around the sun.
The full moon rises tonight, the Worm Moon, announcing the arrival of spring.
Perhaps it’s the wiggle I feel, the wiggle of worms opening the earth to aerate and breathe.
There’s a stirring inside, an impulse led by light.
I settle, allowing roots to stretch and test, balancing a nest of rest, a cradle for eggs and birth. Heart knows the moon, a shared caress.
Reflecting
When someone I love passes, makes a transition to non-form, I feel a portal open. I honor the sacred time.
I listen, receive.
These words of T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets – Little Gidding, comfort me.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
“Tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
What vibrates now?
Surrender
Lately I’ve felt myself flowing down the middle of the stream, recognizing so many things are happening both personally and globally that it’s easiest and best to center in that flow.
A long-time friend passed away yesterday. Steve sent her husband the Mary Oliver poem “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field “. He responded that he hadn’t known the poem but had bought a white owl sculpture last week.
How can we not believe in the support of the earth, water, and air that connects us with every breath and beat of our heart as hearts branch out through lungs and the reach of arms, wrists, and hands?
Ukraine
Today in a meditation for peace I felt the words U Crane – and thought You Crane, as we each reach with the beauty and long curving necks of the bird, and the strength of the cranes that raise buildings into the sky to create a halo of peace for this region.
This morning I read of the deaths of a woman and her two children killed by Russian military artillery in Ukraine. She worked for a software company with one location in Palo Alto, and now I read of the destruction of a maternity hospital. Where do we put such pain?
I focus on the intricacy of the sunflower, a symbol of this region. The sunflower is a bouquet, a composite of many smaller flowers. It’s thick stalk holds a heavy flower to the sky and gives us oil, the new gold.
May we each gather and focus the energy of desire, like a magnifying glass focuses the sun, radiating spirals of smoke to signal a return to peace.
Return
My head just cleared. I’ve been dealing with a horrible cold and cough. It has encouraged mindfulness, though not an open, expansive mind but a rather small mind as nothing much can enter and move through. My focus has been on breath and the effort involved when air and mucus seem to battle for space. I’ve been given an opportunity to notice how I receive and utilize air.
I’m grateful to feel “back” and yet perhaps there is a place for the break for an even greater appreciation of ease in breath.
I’m with ease in the words of Meister Eckhart: If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
Balancing
I’m up early today, surprised to hear the tinkling sound of rain on the roof. My cat and I look out and rejoice. Well, I rejoice, cat not so much.
I’m with what it takes to balance news from Ukraine with our daily lives.
I meditate and come to Pico Iyer:
So, in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.
That reminds me of the poem “Stone” by Charles Simic:
Receiving
Yesterday I was at Stinson Beach on a misty day.
I carried the words of Rilke: The future enters us in order to transform us long before it happens.
I looked at empty crab shells, rocks, waves, sky, and sand. What enters me now?
What moves within?
Life
I’m reading a friend’s book, Sara Bragin’s The Living in Her Dying. It’s about the time she spent with her mother as her mother was transitioning. It shows how much we need an advocate at such a time, and the learning that occurs when we show up to be with the loss of the womb in which we came.
The end of life process is with me these days as I feel the approach of a change over which I may not have control.
Last night I had one of those experiences that takes one out of their body and into awareness of so much more. My cat Tiger is getting older, and needing body warmth, comfort, and support sleeps snuggled in with us at night. When I got into bed last night, he came over with a look that lit the room, that was more than his huge eyes. I felt the gift of this livingness, this gift of being in a body for a time.
I was reminded of Thomas Merton’s words about being on a street corner, and …
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”
He uses the word God. I might use the word Spirit or Light or Grace but the feeling and knowing, believing and honoring – that is the gift.
What’s happening in Ukraine is with us all. We are united in this. We feel the attacks; we share the fear and yet Tiger gave me such an invitation with his eyes, and way of being. I wake as light, flowing light, light that is both particle and wave as am I.
Mourning
Lou Andreas-Salome was Rilke’s teacher, muse, lover and friend. This is from her book, You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke. The memoir was written in 1927, a year after he died.
Mourning is not as singular a state of emotional preoccupation as is commonly thought: it is, more precisely, an incessant discourse with the departed one, in order to draw him nearer. For death entails not merely a disappearance but rather a transformation into a new realm of visibility. Something is not just taken away but is gained, in a way never before experienced. In the moments when the flowing lines of a figure’s constant change and effect become paralyzed for us, we are imbued for the first time with its essence: something which is never captured or fully realized in the normal course of lived existence.
There’s a little bird singing in the trees today. I try to get a picture but one moment the song comes from one tree, and then another. I’m circled – notes calling leaves to come forth from trees.
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