I read these words of Richard Rohr and feel the long neck of immersion and experience, the fluidity, strength, and agility of birds on land and in flight. His words are ballast, support, inspiration, and guide.
Going to the deepest level of communication,
Where back and forth has never stopped.
Where I am not the initiator but the transmission wire itself.
— Richard Rohr
My son and his wife are in Paris celebrating her 50th birthday. Today they were in Giverny strolling through Claude Monet’s home, and water and flower gardens.
I was in San Rafael by the wildlife ponds.
I’m struck by this quote and invite my voice to reveal my immersion in and reception of the breath.
From Philip Shepherd’s book Radical Wholeness.
A person’s voice is like an MRI that reveals immediately how much of her body is available to the breath—and so, too, how much of her being is available to the Present. When the body is liberated from its divisions, it becomes a fluid medium through the entirety of which the breath travels like a wave. Like a living graph, the voice reveals the progress of the breath through the body—and the ways in which the body blocks that progress—to everyone within earshot… If you crave sensation and awareness, you don’t need a magnet in your finger to provide it. The whole of the world lives through you, expressing itself in an avalanche of sensations within. If you could find your way back home to the body, to the breath, to yourself, you would liberate your awareness into the realm of a felt mystery from which you can learn in ways limited only by your willingness to attend to it.
This morning we were awakened by a little bird singing into the camera placed outside. At the Chandler Nature Center, a part of Phoenix, we saw white ducks, a coot, and a Great Blue Heron. It’s a time of unfolding, a living birth.
I’m in Phoenix visiting family which is a delight. I’m minimally involved with the news but seeing our democracy in danger of destruction, has me aware. I read this from Heather Cox Richardson today:
“I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S. Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act,’” lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm defends democratic election laws, wrote today on social media. He added: “I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”
In contrast, we sit outside watching a saguaro cactus in which a woodpecker meticulously maintains a home for her babies. The babies pop their heads out of one hole for feeding , which she alternates with opening another hole on the other side.
Last week I took my usual plethora of photos at Stinson Beach but one stayed with me. This morning, I shared the photo with my son and he pointed out that what I had interpreted as an unusual wave was a shark. He then sent me a diagram showing that, like an iceberg, 90% of the shark can be underwater and we may see only the fin.
Now I see it clearly as a shark, grateful I didn’t pop in for a swim.
It’s Earth Day, as is every day since we, this planet, and our environment evolve as one. Last night I was out with the almost full moon, a reminder of the movement we share.
Heather Cox Richardson is again strong with her substack post. I pull this from it:
The timing of the Interior Department’s new rule can’t help but call attention to Earth Day, celebrated tomorrow, on April 22. Earth Day is no novel proposition. Americans celebrated it for the first time in 1970. Nor was it a partisan idea in that year: Republican president Richard M. Nixon established it as Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.
The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. Her exposé of how the popular pesticide DDT was poisoning the food chain in American waters illuminated the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms, and it caught readers’ attention. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Let us honor the Earth we are, the Earth we share, as we celebrate the Earth each day.
Today on an early morning walk down Tennessee Road to the beach, I was delighted to see a Great Blue Heron standing regally next to the path. Then on the way back up, I watched him or her catch, tenderize, and swallow a snake. The beach was completely different from the last time I was there, less than a week ago. Each moment received with the gusto of a heron harvesting and digesting a snake.
I drove to Stinson Beach this morning. I was early enough to be alone on the beach at low tide. When I lay back on the sand, I heard the waves from underneath and all around, pounding jets, surround sound. Sandpipers skittered and one turkey vulture enjoyed a breakfast of decaying seagull.
“Awakening is truly nothing more or less than being right here in this moment, just as it is, and just as we are.”
— JOAN TOLLIFSON
Yesterday I gave myself a meditative walk down Tennessee Valley to the beach. Today we have rain. I’m with the words of Emily Dickinson:
I dwell in possibility.
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