I have rooms full of bookshelves of books.

Today in looking for Mary Oliver’s book, A Thousand Mornings, I come to one I rarely open though it’s a treasure and rests in a sacred place.  

It’s A Light in the Mist, A Journal of Hope, Out of the Darkness, Into the Light. 

It’s a series of stories about transformation.  I open to a story about a young woman who, eating in a restaurant, dies of a peanut allergy.  Her parents had these words engraved on her tombstone: “God gave us memories so we could have roses in December.”  

The author who is anonymous often goes to visit the grave and sobs, but one day, driving away, though it was November, the scent of roses filled her car.  There were no flower shops around, and the fields were fallow and the trees were bare, and yet, “the fragrance grew stronger, and with it came a sudden sense of deep inner peace”.

Sometimes I smell my mother near.  Who knows what’s here that we share?

I open to another page and these words by Kabir Helminski.

… become ever more

subtle, softened, spacious,

penetrating.  

The house is empty, just me.  How rare that is these days.  The barely driven car had to go in for maintenance, and Steve took on the job of doing it.  How odd this is.  He was sent a checklist of how the visit would be handled, so as to ensure a measure of safety.

We’ve been together full-time with a few simple breaks for four months now, and I pause to feel this shift.  Both kitties are taking their morning naps; birds are singing, and there’s a place inside that feels and fingers the change.

When I watch my grandchild on video and see him in pictures, I see how his fingers are always apart, each one given space.  I do that now, feel the air as grace.

We’re used to being together, my husband and me, two hands clasped, and today a few hours allow an opening in our togetherness, an examination of wholeness as we each taste a wider space.  

Today my “baby” brother would have been 67.   I wake from a dream where I’m dressed in a green robe honoring Nature, Mother Nature.  I feel my brother close and I miss him, and I believe we’re tied, always tied, like the roots and branches of trees.

This morning I’m entranced with the smell of a gardenia I picked last night.  I go outside in the fog and exult in plants grateful for moisture, shared.

I’m perfecting a ginger brownie recipe, so a batch last night, pretty good, and a new one waiting to be cut, hopefully an even more perfect combination of butter, chocolate, fresh ginger, and such.

The news is mind-boggling, like being inside a pinball machine, so I nourish outside, pruning, weeding, watering, seeing how we rise, branch, and give.

I eat red plums from one tree, and yellow from another, both sweet!!

My mother passed away in 2005.  If she were alive today, she’d be 93.  Perhaps that’s why the day feels so sweet.  Love was her Light!

When the power went out today, I was glad I hadn’t waited until the last minutes to do my taxes.  I mailed them Monday.  Now, of course the power is back.  Meanwhile it was a respite.  

The outage gave me time to revisit quotes.  

Thich Nhat Hanh: People say walking on water is a miracle, but to me walking peacefully on the earth is the real miracle.

Jane Hirshfield:  There is only one way to travel and that is inward.  

Adm. Richard E. Byrd, the American arctic explorer, wrote in his book Alone which published in 1938 explored the five months he spent winter alone in a one-room shack in Antarctica.

On June 2nd, 1934, he recorded: The universe is not dead.  Therefore, there is an Intelligence there, and it is all pervading. At least one purpose, possibly the major purpose, of that intelligence is the achievement of universal harmony.  The human race, then, is not alone in the universe. Though I am cut off from human beings, I am not alone.

We are not alone!   

Frank Ostaseski, author of  THE FIVE INVITATIONS: DISCOVERING WHAT DEATH CAN TEACH US ABOUT LIVING FULLY shares his beautiful practice.  

He pauses and places both hands on his chest to feel the contact and the breath.  He says, “I choose Love!”

And in that choice is a pause to consider these words of Alice Walker.

She was someone who would not be rushed. That seems like a small thing. But it is actually a very amazing quality, a very ancient one …. She went about her business as if she could live forever, and forever was very, very long.

Form is not a distraction from emptiness. This movie of waking life is not a problem that needs to be solved, or some kind of cosmic mistake that needs to be transcended. It is more like a dance or a painting or a song to be enjoyed, sometimes in the way a comedy is enjoyed, sometimes in the way a tragedy is enjoyed, sometimes in the way a mystery is enjoyed, sometimes in the way turning off the TV is enjoyed. The body and this whole amazing world of apparent form is so beautiful, so precious, and so utterly fleeting. And the more deeply you enter into any apparent form, the more it dissolves into formlessness.

– Joan Tollifson

I’m sitting with this, this morning.

Sadness washed through me last night when I read that the county in which I live is tightening back up.  I hadn’t taken advantage of the opening except I had scheduled a haircut which is now cancelled.  I used to have long hair, and then, I went through chemotherapy, and had no hair, and then I decided I liked it short, and now, hmmm ….

I feel awake in some odd way.  Perhaps it’s seeing my grandchild on Facetime.  He’s almost 9 months old, and yesterday felt like he was playing his dad.  He loves to go for the phone, and his dad tries to keep it from him, and so, yesterday he would crawl toward something dangerous, and while his dad was moving to lift him away, he’d turn and head for the phone.  What a game, and of course I laugh and laugh because it is so fun, and now today, I notice the freedom in my breath from the laughter.  

We need to laugh and play as we adjust with curiosity and exploration to each new day.

This morning I read Heather Cox Richardson and try not to sink into what the Republican party is trying to do to education.  A democracy needs a well-educated populace.  We need public education, and we need to keep our children safe, safe in every way.

A friend works with children in Spain.  She can already see a tightening in their throat and jaw, a ring around to the occiput in back.  How are our children affected by shelter-in-place?   

I sit with that now, notice my teeth, notice how they sit in my jaw.  Am I offering the contraction of fear to that space, or the expansiveness of love?

How am I tasting what’s here?

I close my eyes and feel the caress of the layers of eyelids on the liquidity of eyeballs.   I rest there.  

Pir Elias Amidon writes: 

Your soul is not a thing.  

It is the fragrance of your life.

Emily Dickinson wrote:

The only news I know 

Is bulletins all day 

From immortality.  

In case you’re not Emily Dickinson, and are interested in the happenings of today, here’s the link:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-12-2020

Yesterday a white woman about 60 attacked me for being an “insane progressive” because I was wearing a mask while standing outside the Mill Valley library.  I was admiring the beautiful garden and the redwood trees.  I was at peace, and then stunned, thinking I’d mis-heard, but then I Googled it.  It’s a “thing”.  

When I went to bed, a story from childhood came to me, the one about the bet between the wind and the sun about who could get the man to take off his raincoat.

The wind blew and blew, and the man just drew his coat tighter, but the sun shone down with bright rays and the man took his coat off.

I continue to believe in the way of the sun though I know there’s a place for the wind to blow through too.

These are challenging times, but I woke this morning to the words from the poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.  We can choose our response and how we live.  

https://poets.org/poem/kindness

I rose early to see the comet but was a little too late, or the trees were in the way.  The morning was alive with twittering though and the moon was still awake.

In an Alan Watts lecture, he talks about how we sometimes treat as serious those things that aren’t serious at all, like doing the dishes. He says, “The whole point of washing the dishes is playful. You don’t wash the dishes for a serious reason. You like the table to look nice. You don’t want to serve up the dishes with dinner with all the leavings of breakfast still lying on them. So why do you want the table to look nice? Well, again, it’s the nice, you see. You like the pattern on it that way.”

He continues that we can become compulsive about these things. 

I think of how yes, I like things to look nice, to have an order that’s pleasing to me, and also, especially these days, how it’s also about cleanliness.  Have we ever been more aware of germs and contagion?  Maybe the fears of the virus are making it clear how connected we are.

The day is exquisitely beautiful.  I listen to the birds sing even though mates have been attracted and babies are born.  Is it simply joy, the joy of washing dishes and putting them away, marking time with the rhythm of relationship and routine?

Today I’m reminded of Lynn Ungar’s wonderful poem “Pandemic”.  That leads me to this poem of hers, “Camas Lilies”.

I sink into these lines:

 Imagine setting it all down—

papers, plans, appointments, everything—

leaving only a note: “Gone

to the fields to be lovely. Be back

when I’m through with blooming.”

Are we ever finished with blooming?  A friend says a hummingbird comes to her face when she sits outside on her deck.  She’s a lovely soul, and I’m sure the hummingbird senses nectar, and fills on what blooms there.  

I walk outside, open my arms, and greet the sun.  I woke too late to see NEOWISE the comet in the early morning sky but I know she’s there streaking along. 

We used to sleep outside on our deck on a featherbed.  I’m with that this morning as I read these words.  

When I went out

In the spring meadows

To gather flowers

I enjoyed myself

So much that I stayed all night

—Akahito

I’m also with John Muir:

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

May we balance on in and out as we feel what’s stirring within, and circling all about.