It’s raining, pure delight, and I’m with windmills, and the simplicity of the discovery that changed the world, and still can, and does.
Thinking about windmills brings me to the story of Don Quixote, “tilting” at windmills. It also reminds me of David Brooks inspiring book, “The Road to Character”. Brooks brings forth the lives of people who’ve influenced and changed our world. He mentions over and over again the wisdom obtained from the classics, novels by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, and others.
I think now of these novels as windmills, harnessing the breath of great minds to grind and turn thought into path.
Today I lean back, lean back to receive. Physically and psychologically, I’ve felt the momentum in leaning back to then, when called, lean forward, and rise.
I’m entranced with Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old climate activist claiming her autism on the spectrum to Aspberger’s, as her Superpower.
She is clear, no dissonance on what she knows is true, and she leads the way.
Friday, September 20th, is a day to lean, rise, and stand on the bench of her example, as we rock connection with the waves of change.
Do you see the Golden Slippers? I walked to the bay this morning before my doctor appointment. This guy was super friendly as he waited for lunch. He wasn’t using his slippers to stir up prey, seemed content to wait on the rocks.
Waiting for lunch
At the end of the 19th century, wading-bird feathers were worth more than $30.00 an ounce, twice the price of gold. The American Ornithologists Union estimated as many as five million birds were killed a year.
Why? To decorate women’s hats.
The feathers of the Snowy Egret, Golden Slippers, were especially prized for their softness and delicacy. This could have led to extinction but in 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt established the nation’s first national wildlife refuge on Pelican Island, Florida, specifically to protect wading birds from plume hunters. As more protections were put in place, the birds were saved, and our waterways are augmented with a niche filled with beauty and grace.
I’m reading a poem by Jim Daniels called “Cosmetic”. In the poem his mother who’s had good vision for 75 years and is now legally blind has had eyebrows tattooed above her eyes. She wants to know how they look. He realizes he could tell her anything.
He continues, “she’s rounding everything off into simple shapes”.
At my age, almost seventy, I am grateful for each moment and what I’m able to do. I recognize the gift of being able to sharpen an eyebrow pencil and draw on brows, but what about when I can’t. Will I simply keep my bangs long, or will I be as I was when I went through chemotherapy, an open lake?
And are eyebrows what we see when we look at another, or is it energy and enthusiasm pouring through, an inner light, as though we look into a cave, and see, yes, there is light. There is light.
Fog moved in while I slept. I felt her coming so I closed windows and doors before I hopped into bed. I’d been outside with the moon and stars, beacons and now the fog is a kiss, a soothing mist. I know what it is to be a flower wet with dew that will lift.
I stayed in bed this Sunday morning; it was still dark. I opened and closed my eyes, played with reception, allowing what was here to come to me.
Simplicity, noticing, opening, awareness. What am I receiving? And then, there was no separation; my hands rose, light.
I considered the words that so affected Charlotte Selver when she heard them from Elsa Gindler.
“Do you feel the air through which you move?”
And in feeling the air, the weight of it, I thought, and “Do I feel the air that moves through me?”
And there I played, a dance of movement, air and me, relationship. Again, I was with the expansion I felt with my brother’s passing, doors opening until there are no doors; there are no walls.
The words of William Blake came to me. “If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern”.
Is that how I see? And perhaps for a moment there was a glimpse simply received.
And then the kitties called. It was breakfast time. After rising, feeding them, and watching water drip through a filter of coffee, and then, adding cream, I walked outside and was brought to the contemplation of non-duality, and these words of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj from his book I Am That.
“Love says: ‘I am everything’. Wisdom says: ‘I am nothing’. Between the two my life flows.”
Yesterday I met a friend at Tennessee Valley. I was early so I placed a blanket under the trees and lay on my back looking up, listening to chirps, and feeling the breeze.
We met and walked in unprecedented heat to the beach. 98 degrees, I learned later. We like to walk and talk because as is said, Solvitur Ambulando. “It is solved by walking”.
What is the “it” you might ask, and in this case, there was no it, just an opening to connect with ourselves, each other, and the landscape of which we’re part.
When we got to the ocean, we looked for shade, and found a little inlet, not a cave because it was open at the top but it allowed us to sit in the shade of the cliff. The rock held water that dripped down my back.
When I mentioned still grieving my brother’s death, she asked what that felt like, and at first I thought of what I’d read, that grief is like waves, comes and goes like waves, but then I realized it was something more. It was expansiveness.
I’m feeling my brother open me to something more, to spaciousness. It’s the cosmic joke perhaps, the huge laugh, and maybe that’s what the Big Bang was, and is, a giant “guffaw”. Who knows but I think we’re designed to laugh, as much as we can, even as we recognize happiness is helping others, because in helping others, we help ourselves because we are all One.
Our days and nights are warm for now, the ripening before the dip to the shortest day and longest night, and then return to spring. We circle like the roundness of the moon as it shines in the sky tonight.
A friend shared this quote by Alan Watts with me, and I was reminded that he was a student of Charlotte Selver, my teacher of Sensory Awareness, and that they taught together, sometimes rejoicing in tossing sticks off his houseboat in Sausalito and watching them float with the tides. Excitement, joy, and fulfillment are everywhere.
“As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?”
~ Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Today I drove early to Stinson Beach. Other than the gulls, I was the only one there.
As I walked toward the water, it looked like the young gulls were in school. Then, I noticed they were gathered around a structure, a creation, an artwork, gathered as though worshipping. Of course, school, properly inspired, is worship, the most important worship we do.
I was reminded of Burning Man but I thought these are gulls, and then, I realized the structure was a wing. The feathers were palm fronds. I don’t know the intent of the gathering, but I imagine in gull world it equaled the one on the Playa.
The tide was low and I walked south past exposed rocks, noticing here and there, a lone gull, or a lone sandpiper. Then, walking back, I saw people stumbling with loads of stuff to plop in their spot. It was time to go.
Gull wing worshipped on the beachThe ocean offers rhythm and blues Gathered to view Each one with a spot
I love this time of year. Yesterday I set up a meditation spot in this room, made it my perception of cozy and safe, and sat down at 5 today to meditate. In June it would be light, an invitation to be out in the yard with plants, but today the dark was a cape, and slowly, the sky came to light.
Sitting quietly, eyes closed, lid meeting the ball of my eye, I had a sense of what it is to be a pumpkin in Autumn in the field, that final growing, and nurturing of inner space and seeds. The question then becomes: Would I prefer to be a Jack-o-lantern, or made into a pie? It’s rare to be both as they are two different kinds of pumpkin, but, hey, it’s my meditation, so why not? Oh, but we meditate for all beings, so I’m all kinds of pumpkin, and pumpkins are a variety of squash and so I expand out into the vegetable and mineral kingdom and beyond.
And there we have the power of meditation opening imagination, which brings empathy, compassion, and understanding to all our parts, especially the part in my case, which imagines my pureed pumpkin self mixed with sugar, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, eggs, and cream to be placed in a crust to bake. Okay, I’m far afield, far from my tangled vines and roots in the field.
Meditation complete, I rise to meet the sky, eyelids raised, and then, I open to this in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tiny book, How to Love.
Goodwill Is Not Enough
Your good intentions are not enough; you have to be artful. We may be filled with goodwill; we may be motivated by the desire to make the other person happy, but out of our clumsiness, we make them unhappy. Walking, eating, breathing, talking, and working are all opportunities to practice creating happiness inside and around you. Mindful living is an art, and each of us has to train to be an artist.
I think of balance. The sky comes to light, untrained, and it’s a moving display, and I understand the human need for training. We are primitive beings.
That’s why I meditate, and in this balancing, I am Jack-o-lantern and pie, field, sky, and light.
There’s a controversy around the origin of words often attributed to Viktor Frankl and certainly the message is his, but the language may have been modified over time. The words are attributed to his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, though they aren’t found there.
Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
Through the work of Alexander Technique, I’m learning to “inhibit” the habit or first response, giving myself space and time to adjust and choose. There is ease as environment and I know and honor our relationship as one.
Yesterday, in my seventh Alexander session, I was disappointed to feel fear in my jaw, knees, and hips, all three of which were more tightly gripped than I prefer. Today I consider what was different in my day.
I’d been reading Obi Kaufman’s book on Water, and though he says he doesn’t want to lead us down a downward spiral when he discusses “climate breakdown”, I felt myself caught in a drain of fear and panic, even though in this moment, all is calm. Water flows in and out of my home. I have power and plants, electrical power and plant power.
This brings me to a fascinating study on flowers and bees that shows that when flowers hear buzzing bees, they make their nectar sweeter. Stimulus and response.
This allows me to feel how I need to monitor my intake of the “news” of the day. I need to notice what’s happening with my breathing, and the space and spaces in torso, head, and legs.
I notice, give space.
Am I contracting even when there is no need to protect? Is there sourness, bitterness, anger, and/or fear? Can I give space to response, without judgment of right or wrong?
When I do, I intake what brings and produces joy, ripples ensue; my jaw is relaxed; my saliva is sweet.
My knees turn out with a curtsied bend that hurrahs, “Ta Da!”
“Ta Da,I’m here, gloriously here, delightfully alive in joy-filled response.”
So, rather than the force being with you, which might lead to a battle within, and another without, may your saliva be sweet, and your kneessoft streams fulfilling sweet dreams.
Flowers soften and nestle rock Plum sweetened trees
Cathy's Blog! 