Today I ask myself: Am I at a fork in the road?
The answer comes: No, I’m a spoon, held in a rounded cup.
I surrender to the words of Rainer Maria Rilke.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence,
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
I knead the soil within, open knots and loosen “nots”, assemble unity. Marie Curie’s words radiate through:
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
My sensory awareness group met today. As I settled into myself and felt the support of the floor and the chair, a tear came and rolled down my cheek. My throat felt tight and scratchy and I began to cough. Grief extended into my heart and down to my feet.
I shared that I was experiencing a visceral feeling of grief from my brother’s death on April 14th. I had hoped I’d moved on.
Later, a woman who’d just completed a workshop at Spirit Rock on death, dying and aging asked if I thought what I was feeling related “just” to my brother’s death. I knew that it was more than that. She suggested that my feelings related to impermanence.
I could feel how true that was.
Later we worked with flexibility using partly inflated balls. I felt my holding and inflexibility. I was trying to hold a stance of strength. I felt the work of holding back tears, what it does to my legs, neck, and spine.
What I learned today is that flexibility and impermanence relate and when I can honor the waves of both, float a little more openly on the natural movement I am, I can breathe, and tears may come, but in and through the tears there are waves, and released, I breathe, and am breathed.
Allowing immersion in impermanence, I hold both joy and sorrow, no dividing, and there I celebrate the wonder of being alive. Vitality is my wand and spring when I honor that impermanence is the ocean and land we share. There’s nothing to do and nowhere to go. I’m here.
The fog is a tight wrap this first Sunday in July, and yet I wake thinking of sunflowers.
Yesterday I learned two friends lost their siblings. One lost her twin.
I’ve stopped counting the days since my brother passed, months now, but found myself expanding out into loss, into an ability to be a circle of petals rather than a tightly held bud of pain and grief.
Last week I joined Steve in his Alexander Technique session. In my first attempt to come down and sit on a stool, I felt fear still held in my knees from the accident where I broke bones in both feet and couldn’t walk. I find myself wanting to honor all that is true for me – fear, grief, anger, love. I want to receive the changes as they come.
May this be so for this collection of matter animated spirit today.
Love, Peace, and Ease.
Because the fog is in today, I look into the eyes of sunflowers. At first, I’m entranced by their petals but then I focus in more closely and what do I see – infinity.
For the celebration of Interdependence, we gathered as a family at my son Jeff and his wife Jan’s home in San Jose. Their home and yard are serene with Senna, a loving rescue greyhound, a garden and view of open land. A short walk to the top of a nearby hill opens up a vista that is the perfect place to watch firework displays from all over the South Bay. Last night, the Fourth of July, I swiveled my head like an owl trying to catch each wondrous opening of color and sparks.
The crescent moon turned golden as it began to sink into the now smoky, as though saged, evening air. The moon felt close, like a guardian, a harbinger of hope. The gathering on the hill consisted of a variety of ages and languages. Children wore headbands of light and ran around freely, no fear.
Today I sink into the truth of interdependence, bounced as though in a hammock to my cells opening to the cells of plants, recognizing the value in the difference in our cell walls. I sink into silence and stillness; receive.
In that, I suggest with kindness that only senility can explain someone stating that the army took over airports in 1775. Such a person needs mental health care.
Home now, loaded with produce from Jeff and Jan’s gardens, I give thanks for abundance in my life, and recognition of, and celebration of change.
The fog is in, softly, tenderly. I re-read the Declaration of Independence on this Fourth of July, considering our steps forward and backward. I look forward to a leap cultivating peace knowing that for every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
It’s a day to honor our Statue of Liberty and the power of connection she represents as enterprising, curious and risk-taking people make their way to our shores.
Here is Bella, in one of her many favorite places. She knows what she wants and needs.
Yesterday I was at Tennessee Valley Beach with Karen. As we sat on the sand, enjoying the waves, flotillas of pelicans flew overhead. I remembered when the work of Rachel Carson ensured their survival. We share a fragile time in history, and perhaps that’s always been true, but when I see the pelicans flap their wings overhead, I’m grateful for those who ensure clean water and air.
My sons are support as I deal with transition and grief. They hold a container for me. We three love the book The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. We read it aloud when they were young. Again, this morning I read the part where the robin directs her to the key and then to the ivy-hidden door.
I sit with that now, with gardens and doors.
I’m reading the Lost Children Archive, a novel, by Valerie Luiselli.
The book is about refugee children coming to our country to escape their own. They are children “who have lost the right to a childhood”.
The novel weaves a personal story with the horrifying and tragic plight of these children.
I learn of Stephen Haff, who has opened a one-room schoolhouse in Brooklyn. It’s called Still Waters in a Storm, and that is what it is.
His students who are immigrants, or children of immigrants, mostly of Hispanic origin, ranging in age from five to seventeen, are taught Latin, classical music, and how to scan poems and understand rhythm and meter. The children learn parts of Paradise Lost by heart and understand it. He and his students do a collective translation of Don Quixote from Spanish to English.
I learn of a little girl, eight or nine years old, arguing passionately over the “exact way” to translate these words:
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams – this may be madness.”
“To surrender dreams – this may be madness.”
I learn about Steven Feld and Murray Schafer who “thought that the sounds people make, in music or in language, were always echoes of the landscape that surrounded them.”
“In Papua New Guinea, Feld had first recorded funerary weeping and ceremonial songs of the Bosavi people in the late 1970’s, and he later understood that the songs and weeping he had been sampling were actually vocalized maps of the surrounding landscapes, sung from the shifting, sweeping viewpoint of birds that flew over these spaces, so he started recording birds. After listening to them for some years, he realized that the Bosavi understood birds as echoes or “gone reverberations” – as absence turned into a presence; and, at the same time, as a presence that makes an absence audible. The Bosavi emulated bird sounds during funeral rites because birds were the only materialization in the world that reflected absence. Bird sounds were, according to the Bosavi, and in Feld’s words, “the voice of memory and the resonance of ancestry”.
Bird sounds – “the voice of memory and the resonance of ancestry”.
Those I’ve lost come to me as birds, my mother as a cardinal, my brother as a Great Blue Heron. My brother passed 79 days ago and still there’s an ache, a continuing awareness of what we shared. I listen to, and watch for birds. They line my landscape and open seams.
R. Murray Schafer, best known for his World Soundscape project, wrote that “hearing is a way of touching at a distance”.
I listen to birds, touched at a distance I might not be able to imagine. I trust in touch.
Each year I reverence this day, the last day of the first six months. I wake and listen – birds, silence, a breath of wind, the metal of the wind chime tapping slowly enough to separate its notes into a wholeness inviting me into my own.
I’ve purposely left this day open, open to what comes, with space between the metal bars of time, open so the wind can move through, twining, twisting, turning, evening out the breath.
I feel emergence from a tactile dome in which I’ve been feeling my way and now I come into spaciousness and light. There is breath, movement in and out, a landscape aware of and including me. I open shutters, let division go.
It’s the 78th day since my brother passed. I planned to stop keeping track but something draws me back in to the ups and downs and ins and outs and yet this morning all blends gently as one.
What moves in me now as I listen to birds call?
In reading one book, I come across another: As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh by Susan Sontag. The title is enough.
I look out on a redwood tree rising to fill my view, consider it as consciousness becoming flesh, needles sprightly in the softness of the breeze, branches rocked by the prancing rush of squirrels.
In this moment, I understand the words of Elias Amidon. “The love you are made of will breathe you in.”
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