I've written three books, each a part of my journey to elderhood. Now with this blog my intention is to give a moment to moment accounting of my life as it is now, and now, and now. I'm a leader and student of Sensory Awareness, and a practitioner of Rosen Method. I believe in the connective and collective power of Love.
The beloved teacher, guide, loving presence, and inspiration for Interbeing has passed away.
I open a little book I keep here on my desk, A Handful of Quiet, Happiness in Four Pebbles.The practice is to gather four pebbles, and let each one represent a flower, a mountain, still water, or space.
Then, the meditation is:
Breathing in, I see myself as a Flower.
Breathing out, I feel Fresh.
Breathing in, I see myself as a Mountain.
Breathing out, I feel Solid.
Breathing in, I see myself as Still Water.
Breathing out, I Reflect things as they are.
Breathing in, I see myself as Space.
Breathing out, I feel Free.
The creek in Mill Valley today Looking into the stream – Reflect
I start this day with the words from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes”.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
And she did.
It’s still dark here at 6:15. In summer, it would have been light long ago. What am I meant to do with the silence, the integration of darkness with the coffee I sip, and all that brings coffee, connection and warmth to me?
I sit with Ajahn Chah’s words, “Even chickens sit.”
And so I sit with the image of my roost and the eggs that need protecting in the rhythm of my heart.
One child – all children, including the child in each of us –
In “An Unbroken Sequence”, The Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron write:
A stable, solid body is a mental image superimposed onto a stream of events in the same way that a spinning propeller is seen as a circle. The constant succession of discrete acts of cognition or feeling appears as a monolithic event, just as the rapid change of frames in a film appears as a smooth continuum.
And yet, we often pull ourselves apart to see ourselves as separate, as separate blades or leaves rather than recognizing we are one tree, one world.
My friend Pamela sent me a link to an article by Richard Powers.
“We’re now in the middle of a family emergency that will test all family ties. Only kin, and lots of it, from every corner of creation will help us much in the terrible years to come. We will need tales of forgiveness and surprise recollection, tales in which the humans and the nonhumans each hold half a locket. Only stories will help us to rejoin human to humility to humus, through their shared root. (The root that we’re looking for here is dhghem: Earth.)
Kinship is the recognition of shared fate and intersecting purposes. It is the discovery that the more I give to you, the more I have. Natural selection has launched all separate organisms on a single, vast experiment, and kinship glimpses the multitudes contained in every individual organism. It knows how everything that gives deepest purpose and meaning to any life is being made and nurtured by other creatures.
Can love, in its unaccountable weirdness, hope to overcome a culture of individualism built on denying all our millions of kinships and dependencies? That is our central drama now. It’s the future’s one inescapable story, and we are the characters who will steer that conflict to its denouement.
To find the stories that we need, we would do well to look to the kinship of trees. Trees signal one another through the air, sharing an immune system that can stretch across miles. They trade sugars and secondary metabolites underground, through fungal intermediaries, sustaining one another even across the species barrier. But maybe such communal existence shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, everything in an ecosystem is in mutual give-and-take with everything else around it. For every act of competition out there, there are several acts of cooperation. In the Buddha’s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axe-men who destroy it. Incidentally, the same man once said: The self is a house on fire. Get out while you can.”
At Commonweal, a huge tree fell. It would have damaged, if not destroyed a residential building, but a palm tree caught it and saved the building. Luck, or kinship, awareness, and communication?
Water in the bay yesterday – the moving tide By the marsh – habitat and feast
It’s a day to honor courage. The word comes from the French, couer, the heart.
We honor one man today, Martin Luther King, Jr.
In 1957, he said:
“I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. To return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Someone must have sense enough and religion enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil, and this can only be done through love.”
Spiraling open the layers of LoveSo many ways – how does each of us unfold Building bridges
Maria Popova shares wonderful and intriguing thoughts in The Marginalian. Today I read her thoughts on how we deal with death. She quotes from Alan Lightman’s book Mr. g: A Novel about the Creation.
Alan Lightman:
A woman dies. At that moment, there were 3,147,740,103,497,276,498,750,208,327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.
In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.
Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.
He continues on and I tempt you into reading her whole article, and then the book with these words.
And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality.
The passage of the virus is showing us how we are all connected, and last night there was an underwater volcanic eruption near the Tonga Islands. This morning a tsunami warning has been issued along the west coastof the U.S.
I remember we had a tsunami warning when my children were in elementary school. The principal marched the children up the hill for safety. Nothing happened but the concern was ocean water could sweep up through the Tennessee Valley to the school. I felt the principal did the right thing, and the children loved being outside, and yet, he was criticized.
I vote for erring on the side of caution, and so today a pause and gratitude for Mother Nature and her wake-up calls as we respond to her need to move, juggle, and jiggle the elements we transition, transform, and share.
It’s the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.. He said: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Above Tennessee Valley Tennessee Valley beach on Thursday – Winter Light
I haven’t stayed connected with my high school class but thanks to social media, I am now connected. This morning I learned that another from my class of 1967 has passed away. She had dementia the last few years. I try to align the information with the exuberant cheerleader I remember. She’s not the only one I know my age who has gotten dementia and passed away.
It’s an odd entry into this new day where gratitude is the only song I need. I hear the garbage trucks as my garbage sorted into three cans, trash, recycling and compost, is carted away.
Connection –
Molting –
Trust that bonds are never broken, simply carried away – like the moon pulling the tides.
Today I felt like Mole in one of my favorite books, Wind in the Willows. Spring was calling. One room in particular beckoned. I moved the desk to open and wash the windows. Then, I looked around in quest of a whole new look. I moved the couch, then, the bookcase, piling up books to give away. Now, candles are lit, lights are on, and it’s open, fresh, and cozy, all at the same time.
I won’t go down to the river like Mole. I’m pleased to taste and ingest this day of response, knowing spring this time of year is a quick guest, and winter will return.
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