Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Maya Lin

I’ve been entranced with Maya Lin’s sensitivity and talent since I first learned of her when she, at the age of 21,  designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.  

If you’ve been there, you know how tears come as you’re touched by the strength, power, and honoring in her design.

Now, in reading about her redesign of the Neilson Library at Smith College, I learn this.  

“I owe my existence to Smith,” she answered bluntly. “I owe them everything.”

She related the story of her mother, Julia Lin, who was attending college in Shanghai in May 1949 as Mao Zedong’s Communist army besieged the city. The day Mao’s forces marched into Shanghai, Julia received a scholarship to transfer to Smith in the fall — if she could get there. That August, with two $10 bills and her acceptance letter sewn inside a dress collar, her father had her smuggled out of the country on a fishing boat, even as bombs were falling overhead and pirates cruised the harbor looking to rob seaborne escapees. It took a month for her to finally make it through Nationalist Army lines, sail south to Hong Kong, and eventually arrive here in Northampton. But once on campus, Lin said, her mother thrived, graduating in 1951 and then going on to earn a Ph.D. in Chinese language and literature at the University of Washington. There she met and married a fellow Chinese refugee grad student. Both became professors at Ohio University.

The article in the NY Times is here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/arts/design/maya-lin-smith-college-daniel-wolf.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR3ZCG1O4EMSABBIqDTbXs67cI5JvpL4OvjUypUdIe9nybTLEtTWu7KKGGQ

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Heartbreaking

Today I read more on the shootings in Atlanta, the deaths, the lives of those who were murdered.  I don’t know how we begin to understand.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: 

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens. 

May this be evident and true with all that’s happening now, a time of one bombardment after another. 

Joanna Macy:  

The life pouring through us, pumping our heart and breathing through our lungs, did not begin at our birth or conception. Like every particle in every atom and molecule of our bodies, it goes back through time to the first splitting and spinning of that stars.

Camellia opening to Spring

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Honoring the Flame

The second vaccine hit me hard and I’ve spent the last two days in a foggy cocoon of sleep.  Today I rise and read the news and am sickened.  I don’t understand how Trump cannot be held responsible for these attacks on Asian people.  The vaccine has now passed through and feeling well, I’m shocked and sickened at what he’s created for his own gain.

We’ve had a soft spring rain which also may have led to my spending so much time in bed as though I’m a plant still underground being tapped awake to rise.  

I’m with some lovely quotes and words this morning.

Emily Dickinson:

How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

Thich Nhat Hanh:

When people ask me for my address, I tell them, “It’s the here and now.”

When the National Gallery opened in 1941 President Roosevelt gave the dedication speech. He said, “To accept this work today is to assert the purpose of the people of America — that the freedom of the human spirit and human mind which has produced the world’s great art … shall not be utterly destroyed.”

In Moon Tiger Penelope Lively wrote:

“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.”

Joseph Goldstein in The Evolution of Happiness:

“When we’re in harmony with ourselves, we give a wonderful gift to other people—the gift of trust.“

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Gratitude

When I again drove to the Civic Center for my second shot of the vaccine, tears of gratitude came just like last time.  There are three check-ins staffed by happy volunteers.  My flashing St. Patrick’s Day shamrocks added to the mood though I wasn’t the only one flashing green.   

There was a slight delay as the vaccines were late and no one complained.  Disneyland may have once been called the happiest place on earth, but I can tell you these vaccination sites outpace that by a zillion times.

Last time Adrian vaccinated me and today, David, a retired doctor.  

I walked out and felt I was seeing differently, more expansively, gratefully.  It’s quite an operation and a heart-lift of gratitude for the energy that brings us all together to save and protect as many of us as possible.

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Transition

Where I live we are moving into a loosening up as more people are vaccinated.  When might we get together?  How will that feel and be?  We’ve been cocooned, and what is it now to open up and out and spread our wings?  Trees are budding and flowers are blossoming.  Spring is in the air.  I’m reminded of Wind in the Willows when Mole smells the fresh air and goes to the river where he meets Rat, and they fool around in a boat and become friends.

I woke this morning thinking of the famous picture of the two people kissing at the end of World War II.  There was a clear end.  This is different, will be and has been a gradual opening and then closing, and of course, we’re hoping this opening will continue to expand.

Meanwhile it is for each of us to feel our way to how we step back into a wider world of personal touch and connection.

I’m with these words from the Gospel of Thomas. 

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

May we all bring forth what is within us, honoring there.  

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Pi and Pie Day

Michael Atkinson led sensory awareness yesterday on Zoom and I and others were deeply affected.  I believe his intention was expansiveness and connecting with and extending what we might perceive of as boundaries.  We began holding a blanket in one hand, two hands, hands extended palms up, and I felt how when my feet fully feel and connect with the ground, the blanket is light and connection is effortless.  He spoke of movement as gesture, gesture for in and the world, gesture in and for ourselves.  Play with it.  I was up in the night playing with movement as gesture and what that does to head, mouth, ears, eyes, and my connection with a wider world.  Perhaps you needed to be there, or perhaps not, but see what that one word – gesture does for you today as you celebrate an irrational number that goes on and on circling and enlivening our nights and days.

I’ve never seen a square rock so round your corners today and sing of circles
Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Pi Day Eve

I’m baking pies because tomorrow is Pi Day, a day to celebrate the consistency and wonder of the circle.  Where would we be without circles?

The importance of pi has been recognized for 4000 years.  By 2000 B.C. the Babylonians and the Egyptians recognized the constant that every circle has the same ratio of circumference to diameter which is 3.14 and counting. By the start of the 20th century, about 500 digits of pi were known. With computation advances, thanks to computers, we now know more than the first six billion digits of pi.

So think 3.14 and go from there on March 14th.

Here are some images to delight, as you make or buy a pie to celebrate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/14/10-stunning-images-show-the-beauty-hidden-in-pi/

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Like a Jellyfish

This morning I woke feeling myself sinking calmly into a pond, anchored like the lotus, content to sink into mud, and then, I thought of mushrooms and mycelium, mycelium running all through the earth, connecting, unseen, and then, I felt myself as that reproductive body, the mushroom, popping up and out with rain.  We’ve had rain.  

I should check my yard and see what’s growing there but now in this moment, sprouts rise and bloom from my heart.

I feel content these days.  Garrison Keillor writes of that place.  Perhaps it’s a Midwestern thing that signals connection with a few, and yet …

Ken McLeod in Reflections on Silver River writes this: 

As my teacher once said, “If you could really take away the suffering of everyone in the world, taking all of it into you with a single breath, would you hesitate?”

And then he introduces Tonglen meditation as a way to begin.

Today I float up and down like a jellyfish trusting immersion in my environment and unfolding in and as what comes and goes.

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Gratitude

I wake with gratitude.

We learn that Ebi, the rescue greyhound,  did race.  She was in 15 races and won one.  She wasn’t even two years old.  No wonder she’s so grateful to just snuggle now.  Racing dogs are kept in crates.  The girl crates are on top of the boy crates. That’s their life, a crate and a chance for a sprint. That’s it.

Her name was Super C Rumor, a rather odd one.  I like Ebi.

I watched the movie Awakenings last night.  It was my third time, and again, like with Ebi, it leads me to wonder what is this immersive connection  called life.  Bella is here on the chair next to me.  I’m caressed by her curled sleep of contentment, her breath.

It rained in the night and more rain comes.  I feel the streambeds fill and roots reach for water to drink, cleanse, and raise.  Offering abounds.  

I read that this year is just like last year only this year we have toilet paper.  Ah, and one can only laugh and the rain pours down, pure grace.

Losing oneself in what is Here

Is finding that “Here” is what one IS.

– Wei Wu Wei

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Knowing Enough

Friends are going through chemotherapy right now which may be why I’ve wondered what to post.  My experience comes back, and I remember the beauty of connection, the clarity and gratitude that we are all one and we do a great deal to save the life of another.

Lately I’ve been with the uniqueness of each one of us, the uniqueness of our experience and perception.

Recently I read The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion.  As reading does, it allows one entry into the mind of another, a man with Aspergers.  It’s laugh out loud funny in places and yet there’s a deeper stream of compassion and strength holding it all together.  Though it’s a trilogy, I only read the first book.  It was enough, and I’m with enough these days, knowing enough.

I’m grateful to be alive and well and able to feel the reverberations of all we create and share as we balance the tides and embrace and release with care.

Ebi, the rescue greyhound, thinks she’s a Lap Dog.