My Story! – Page 163 – Cathy's Blog!

Posted on June 6, 2019June 6, 2019 by Cathy Edgett · 1 Comment

Day 54: Evening Shifts

Today at 12:30 Steve and I saw Neal Stephenson interviewed by Kevin Kelly at The Interval at Fort Mason. We then looked out at the Golden Gate Bridge and watched two sea lions frolic as we enjoyed Meyer lemon fettuccini and spring rolls at Greens restaurant.

This evening I started reading some of Neal Stephenson. The book starts out in Iowa which makes sense since he grew up in Ames, Iowa. My mother, father, and I moved to Ames from Chicago when I was six weeks old. Later we moved to Des Moines, and then to a house on the Mississippi River near LeClaire, Iowa, home of the Buffalo Bill Museum.

Something of my brother’s passing has memories percolating through, dropping like the ladybugs that are currently swarming and migrating to drop down and eat aphids and lay eggs.

What’s the connection, you might ask. Well, for the last few years I’ve been working on my book Airing Out the Fairy Tale: Trekking through Nepal & Midlife, which required a great deal of memory retrieval since the focus was on my trek in Nepal twenty-five years ago. Though the book has been out for over a month, today there was a shift and I recognized it’s done. My brother has passed and the book is complete, and my head is shaking to clear all its been holding, to let it go, and open to spaciousness and what will come.

I’m letting go, and in that letting go, I pause to even more clearly and rapturously notice the vibrancy of the nature I am and of which I’m part. Memories float down like blossoms, ladybugs, and ash. The pause gives me strength. I birth.

View from our table at Greens Restaurant today

Posted on June 6, 2019June 6, 2019 by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Day 54: Gratitude

On the fifty-fourth day of my brother’s passing, I look out on a morning, still, quiet. Overhead, in the distance a jet streams by in the blue. I picture people traveling from Asia getting ready to land. Sometimes I find it hard to hold in my head all the lifestyles on this planet, all those who travel and those who stay still.

A friend just spent five weeks on the island of Sardinia. She said the people there consider themselves a family, and families spend their days together. It’s hard to imagine where I live when there’s so much distance between families and ages. There, she said, you see children helping grandparents up and down steps. It’s not a duty; it is.

Families gather quietly together during the day, eat dinner around eight, and are all together in the market squares until eleven. How is it to live like that?

I don’t know but I do know we are on this earth as a family. How do we then more clearly honor and cultivate all the stages of life? As we explore the possibilities, perhaps we better understand what appears to be separation, as exchange, as we bind and unbind the passages and transformations that clasp and unclasp life and death.

I look at a rose, the grip of petals before they let go, feel the beat harvest gratitude in my chest.

Posted on June 5, 2019June 5, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 53: Joy of Being Born

Yesterday my friend Elaine who is a sports fan, specifically a Warriors fan, taught me something new, a sports term, GOAT, Greatest of All Time.

I considered how I’ve never had a desire to be the greatest of all time, and I came up with my own: JOBM – Joy of Being Me.

As she took delight in JOBM, I came up with another: JOBU – Joy of Being Us, because, after all, we are intertwined.

This morning I woke from a vivid dream. I was holding a baby boy, a beautiful baby boy, and then, he was a toddler, and we were learning together. Then, we ate sushi. I don’t know how to interpret the sushi part though I do love sushi, but what I felt at first, and what I’ve been feeling is that my grandson, who is still in the womb of his mother, communicates with me though dreams. This is not the first, but then, I thought, perhaps it is my brother reborn, but it is only the 53th day since his passing and that would be a quick transition, so then, I remembered we’re everyone in our dream. The baby is me. Each day, each moment, we reincarnate; we are reborn.

I lay in bed this morning feeling like phyllo dough, folded and coated with butter, and folded and coated over and over again.

My heart is huge with JOBB – Joy of Being Born, knowing that though my brother was born in 1953, and I in 1949, we’re continually being born.

Posted on June 4, 2019June 4, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 52: Peace

Fog sits on the ridge.

Yesterday I saw a hummingbird hovering amongst branches of a tree. A closer look revealed her tiny nest. I assured her I meant no harm and walked on.

I saw five baby goats snuggling together at Slide Ranch. The two mothers stood nearby watching. Two months ago one birthed twins and the other triplets, but the little ones cuddled as one.

There are places of peace. Watching children with goats is one of these.

Overseeing the ocean is another.

My brother passed fifty-two days ago and I find ease.

Posted on June 3, 2019June 3, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 51: Gratitude

It’s Steve’s birthday. He’s 71. We wake at 4:30, grateful for our lives.

I snuggle in, lie flat on my back in bed, feel myself as a garden, feel myself as soil. My brother’s passing 51 days ago is fertilizer, liquid fertilizer, liquid love, seeping into the soil of my being, blood and bone, circulating. Plants hold roots as we hold hands. Life and death do the same.

I lie in bed allowing the space in my head to open. Eyeballs breathe, nourish on roundness. Legs part like legs of a frog. The soles of my feet touch.

I lie there receiving. My legs make a heart with soul, pelvis a cauldron receiving what comes now.

An owl calls who, who, who, and insides reply, “all here”, and outside fog holds a veil of mist, and ridge and ocean, though unseen, are here. Gratitude completes.

Posted on June 2, 2019June 2, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 50: Blessings

Though I’d intended to hibernate on the 49th day of my brother’s passing, I walked down to the end of our street and then another street to attend an outdoor neighborhood meeting. We live on a county non-maintained road, and 100 years ago a map was drawn up of “paper streets”. Now, living in different times, we navigate the issues of overcrowding, drainage, fire danger, and unethical developers. The silver lining is we meet our neighbors. The downside is it can be unsettling.

As I walked back the woman who organized the meeting invited me into the magic that is her garden. They have an acre of land, and as do I, she feels the vibration of the Native people, the Coast Miwok, coming through. She wants to honor the creatures who live here with us, the plants and microorganisms in the soil.

She has done all the gardening work herself, and I see how it fuels her energy to fight development that would take away even more land from the creatures with whom we share this land: deer, possums, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, and even a mountain lion at times.

I walked through a tunnel of flowers and a fairy garden paradise. Pictures can’t capture the magic, but I offer a few.

I post the above and see it as enough but as I read a book on grief called The Grief Recovery Handbook by James and Friedman, I see I left out where I was most touched. It felt too tender perhaps but I look at that word compassion and realize it’s important I share a little more. Lee pointed out an amaryllis that hadn’t been blooming at 8:45 and yet there it was at 9:45, like this.

Then after an hour or so of winding paths, she showed me where a redwood tree was cut and where it now comes back. Renewal speaks.

Hearts form where the trunk of the redwood tree was cut.

Posted on June 1, 2019June 1, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 49: Interconnection

Today is the 49th day since my brother passed. I’ve been wondering how this day would feel as the Buddhists honor this day as the one who has passed makes a choice as to whether to return or move on.

Yesterday I felt my brother on a boat tossing a rope to a dock on which I stood. I woke this morning knowing that’s not it at all.

First, I noticed my breath was/is everywhere. I’m being breathed.

There’s no inhale, pause, exhale, pause. Breath is everywhere, in all the cells, and expanding out. I’m breathing through my whole head, allowing separation between my eyes and throughout my head and heart, and I realize all this with the 49th day isn’t related to him or me. It’s like when I was at the Everest Memorial only in this case rather than feeling impersonal, and grounded in cold, this is a feeling of warmth and knowing. I am the boat, the dock, the water, the earth, the universe. There never was, and is not now any separation between my brother and me, between life and death.

Perhaps that is what people risk at altitude; it’s one reason they keep climbing. They want to touch this knowing, Less air and less oxygen allow one to live knowing an expansiveness that can’t be found at sea level, and then, this morning, it’s here. I’m here. I am.

People are dying wanting to get to the top of Mount Everest. People wonder why. Perhaps I give a taste in my book, Airing Out the Fairy Tale: Trekking through Nepal & Midlife.

In my book, I write about stepping into the circle of stones, the sacred site where those who’ve died on Everest are honored, the Everest Memorial.

“Celeste, Sante, and I separated, each drawn to explore different sections within the circle, each needing to find our own way to honor and grieve. The wind blew icy cold. Something new entered my bones. Not fear or even grief. I stepped out – or was brought out – of humanness, into something more elemental.”

I say more in the book and then come to say: It’s as though those who’ve died “were winging there way through stars, as though the expansiveness of death was impersonal. I could believe we sing the universe into being as we tune into the vibrations between the cells. We are tuning forks.”

We continued to walk outside the circle of stones and continued along and up. and as we did so, I felt my “steps were elemental like candle flames, ignition for prayer”.

In this moment, sitting here in my chair as the day is softly lit I feel my breath elemental and rich. I know all is one and my brother is here.

The word healing is about wholeness, feeling whole. In this moment, I am whole: tree, seed, root, air, water, soil.

Posted on May 31, 2019May 31, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 48: Pruning to See

My brother passed 48 days ago, and today, I sink into honoring his passage, honoring the eve of the 49th day. The fog is in and I can’t see the ridge. I’m wrapped in movement as the fog passes slowly along, a flag of ease in the most gentle of parades.

I wake today feeling a shift, an honoring of knowing enough, of knowing more clearly how to nourish this world we share, honoring with gratitude my little piece and place.

Meanwhile chainsaws start up at 8 AM, one to the left and one to the right. Two neighbors below have chosen this day to prune.

I wonder what is mine to prune this day as I open my eyes wide enough to feel their origin in my skull, two balls round like the earth, open to see all sides and points of view.

Posted on May 30, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 47: Sacred Time

This morning I wake aware of my sacrum, the triangular bone at the base of the spine.

I wiggle around, rippling the muscles that hold it, imagining breath moving through the sacrum like butterfly wings lifting the bow of my lungs.

Perhaps this desire for movement is because I spent time with a gopher snake yesterday as it crossed the path I was on. I wanted to ensure it made it all the way across so I enjoyed its sinuous movement and the constant flicking of its tongue as it tasted its way to the other side and slipped into the grasses to camouflage, food, and safety.

It’s the 47th day since my brother passed. I feel him here, as though his essence is sprinkling down and through me like flakes of gold. I feel caught in balancing like a bird flying into the wind, caught on receiving a horizon moving in and out of time and space.

Friend Gopher Snake traversing what may be his or her view of climbing Everest

Posted on May 29, 2019May 29, 2019 by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Day 46: Manifesting

I’ve been honoring the days since my brother’s passing, preparing myself for the 49th day when the Buddhists believe a choice is made by the one departed.

I’m flooded with memories of all we shared and my heart breaks and comes back together over and over again. It’s like the tides slowly wearing away and piling up sand.

I plan to honor my brother on Saturday, the 49th day. I prepare.

Today I wash and touch with tender fingers and soft heart a feminine figure he gave to me years ago when I felt a bit stuck. Her lap is a cauldron, a heart, a bowl, a place to hold wishes and incubate desire and need for fulfillment and creativity. He used it to manifest his art and the next stage of his life. I use it now to manifest what is meant to come. How can I know? I trust that the universe brings me more than I can imagine. I trust what comes to me now.