Tomorrow is a National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter though it seems we’re already mourning as we’re thrust into the contrast between his leadership and concerns for human rights, the environment, and peace, and what comes.
I had a blood test this morning which was anchored before and after with seeing birds by the creek.
Mushrooms are decomposers, recyclers, that nourish the soil. With the rain, they popped up overnight in our yard representing what works unseen.
Ikkyu: translation by R. H. Blyth
The vast flood
Rolls onward
But yield yourself,
And it floats you upon it.
I found myself eating peanuts yesterday as I read Jimmy Carter’s book A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety.
I learned that at the age of five, he set up his own business, picking peanuts, boiling them, and packaging them in small bags which he then walked two miles to town to sell. He was an entrepreneur at five.
NASA is grateful to him for saving the Space Shuttle program which continues to benefit us here on earth.
His words are on the Voyager Golden Record: “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”
Today from Heather Cox Richardson:
Yesterday, Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal, given to those “who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens,” to twenty Americans including former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who served on the January 6 committee. Today, Trump attacked Cheney and others who investigated the events of January 6, 2021, as “dishonest Thugs.”
Cheney responded: “Donald, this is not the Soviet Union. You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us. Remember all your lies about the voting machines, the election workers, your countless allegations of fraud that never happened? Many of your lawyers have been sanctioned, disciplined or disbarred, the courts ruled against you, and dozens of your own White House, administration, and campaign aides testified against you. Remember how you sent a mob to our Capitol and then watched the violence on television and refused for hours to instruct the mob to leave? Remember how your former Vice President prevented you from overturning our Republic? We remember. And now, as you take office again, the American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our Constitutional Republic—to protect the America we love from you.”
There’s an old saying: Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. I disagree. I believe words can hurt, and they can connect, comfort, and heal.
In George Saunders’ book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he comments on Leo Tolstoy’s short story, Master and Man. He writes that “Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.”
Saunders says we don’t have to “become an entirely new person to do better; our view just has to be readjusted, our natural energy turned in the right direction”.
For example, if you are a world-class worrier, your worry energy might get directed at extreme personal hygiene, you’re “neurotic”. If it gets directed at climate change, you’re an “intense visionary activist”.
In the book, as a man is dying, he comes to realize “oneness”. The question becomes if he had lived after the realization, would he have returned to the series of lies that he told himself, lies that motivated him to go forth and prove he was better, best, “central”, “separate”, and “correct”.
On Christmas Eve, the family went to Bedwell Bayfront Park in Menlo Park. As we climbed up the hill to savor the views, we found we were on a poetry trail. Called the Great Spirit Path, the trail is a single poem broken down into 53 verses spread throughout the park. Each verse is represented by a large stone sculpture inspired by Native American pictographic art.
This “Stonehenge by the Bay” is a stone poem in four stanzas designed by Menlo Park artist Susan Dunlap and installed along a ¾ mile long trail. Each of the 53 rock sculptures represents a phrase in the poem. It is made of 892 rough natural stones weighing more than 505 tons.
As we enter this new year, we can choose where to focus, expand, and integrate. We can caress and reflect the bones of the earth, the bones in ourselves, and the words that bind and heal.
Last night we sat outside expanding on starlight as we watched for meteors. This morning it’s raining. My father died 56 years ago tomorrow. Memory rides on beams and beads of light.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
As you inhale, fill your heart with compassion, and as you exhale pour the compassion over your head.
Already I see and feel the increasing light. I open Mary Oliver’s book Owls and Other Fantasies since this morning I was out early to hear an owl’s joyful hoot of goodbye to night.
In one essay called Bird, she writes of finding an injured black-back gull and bringing him into their home. Seriously injured, he survived in their home for a few months, bringing interest, comfort, and delight. Even as he was dying, she writes, “And still the eyes were full of the spices of amusement”. And then, …
“He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact, this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.”
And then, he wasn’t, but still each day morning comes with light.
Last night we enjoyed our ritual of cheese fondue, the blend of Emmental and Gruyere cheese melted with wine, as the swirl of bread catches the clasp and unclasping of changing years.
We each have our own rituals as we pause and contemplate what calls us now as we meet what comes.
This week is one of transition, as we, in the Northern hemisphere, come together to honor the return of light. The word halcyon is said to come from a mythical bird who, breeding in a nest floating at sea at the winter solstice, charms the wind and waves to calm.
My grandson loves the book Ziji: The Puppy Who Learned to Meditate, and from the photos in the book seems to associate Ziji with the Buddha. We were at my son’s home for Christmas Day, and when grandson saw the statue of the Buddha in the gazebo in their yard, he said Ziji. I sit with the image now, peace, a mind at peace.
I’m with the words of Edward O. Wilson:
It is possible to spend a lifetime in a magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.
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