My Story! – Page 35 – Cathy's Blog!

Posted on October 13, 2023October 13, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

One Mouse

Wednesday night I got up around 2 AM and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When I turned on the light, a mouse jumped and ran across the counter. I jumped and shrieked, then went into the bedroom and shut the door from an invader that seemed huge.

Last night, having ignored the situation, I debated what to do. I cleansed everything and put all the food away. I emptied the bin and left it without even a bag.

This morning when I looked in the bin, I saw what I thought was either a sleeping or a dead mouse. Then it moved. I had time to observe it wasn’t gigantic and wasn’t a threat. I realized it had been able to climb out when there was a bag there but without it, it was stuck in the bottom of a slippery-sided bin. I covered the top and carried the bin up to the road and into plants and weeds, where bending the bin down, the mouse scurried out with room to hide and feed.

Last night a friend recommended a book her seventh grade granddaughter is reading. The book by Lois Lowry is from the series The Giver. At first it seems to describe a perfect world, but then you learn what’s sacrificed to create such peace.

I think of the mouse released from what might have seemed a perfect environment with warmth, safety, and food into an outside world into which there’s freedom and also hawks and cats.

No judgment on either realm, though another opportunity to examine what freedom and safety mean to each of us.

As I spray peppermint oil around the house to deter other mice, I listen to chainsaws as a neighbor cuts down even more trees. People worry about fires so they cut down trees, and then they deal with flooding. We live interdependently and in a world of complexity as we navigate the challenges and opportunities each day offers and provides.

I recently re-read the book High Conflict by Amanda Ripley. I highly recommend it. I’m with how the novel Lord of the Flies which most of us read in high school took a real-life incident where some boys were stranded together and worked peacefully to survive, and turned it into a book showing the opposite. I wonder why. May this world move toward and evolve in peace.

A bench outside the Bay Model in Sausalito

Threadbare: Created from empty thread spools at the Fiber Art exhibit inside the Bay Model

My son and his wife have two greyhounds and when two others visit, they all get along.

Posted on October 11, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Finding Peace

This weekend, we watched the movie Finding Nemo with my almost four year old grandson. Having seen it as an adult, I didn’t expect it to be so traumatic for a child that age. First, Nemo is lost and the father is frantic. Then Nemo is captured by a diver attempting to save a life, but to grandson it was torture to see Nemo trapped in a bowl.

After the movie we went online to look at all the sea creatures in the movie, and to explain the story a little more clearly. What’s with me now is how our planet is like a fish bowl. We share an aquarium that circulates water and air, and right now the disturbances, for us all, are huge.

Thinking of Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things”, I went to the marsh to “rest with the grace of the world” and be free.

Great White Egret watching the tide flow in

On the wall at my doctor’s office created by Dr. Zand

Nestled in the trunk of a redwood tree – downtown Mill Valley

Posted on October 6, 2023October 6, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Passage

My youngest son is 46 years old today. It’s a warm, sunny day with so much twittering it sounds like spring, but the Monarch butterflies are flying about which means fall.

Perhaps a day of celebrating birth unites all the years, brings the seasons together like a womb holding and preparing for emergence of a new coherence and birth.

I read recently that when two sand dunes approach, come together, and part, they leave behind a tiny sand dune. I’ve never observed this for myself but I immerse in the image of connection, separation, and birth.

The windows are open, unusual for here, and in the night I heard all the critters that come out to explore and feed in the dark. I forget how active the night is, and perhaps that’s another entry into appreciation of where life leads me now as I age and mature. What am I coming to see that I didn’t notice or acknowledge before? What fills and guides me now?

I just finished reading Returning Light: Thirty Years on the Island of Skellig Michael by Robert L. Harris.

The book is a poetic meditation on his 30 years as a caregiver and guide on the Irish island of Skellig Michael. He’s there from May to October, observing and living with thousands of birds, especially puffins, and the memories of the monks who a thousand years ago built on this rock a place to isolate and meditate. It’s a place for the waves of light to unite loneliness and belonging.

Harris writes: Emptiness. And light changing, and changing, the vision of ourselves.

Light! Change! Vision!

Who likes it?

I do!

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Lanterns

This morning I was out in the dark with the stars and the moon. Brightness in the dark – Lanterns in the heart.

Upon needing to move from one home to another, Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend:

I am out with lanterns looking for myself.

This time of year, autumn, fall, reminds us to look for lanterns, even if it’s the orange of a pumpkin carved to better see the light within.

And as we toast, then eat the pumpkin seeds, we enter more deeply into the night light of meditation. Each moment seeds the web that connects.

Ram Dass:

Meditation offers an opportunity to have a different experience of consciousness, not as a separate individual but as part of an interconnected web of life.

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Watching Clouds

Last night I watched the clouds play hide and seek with the moon. This morning, again, I’m entranced with images, movement, and change.

A monk asked the Zen Master:

What is meditation?

Not meditation.

Then what is it?

Alive.

– Zen Master Joju

Posted on September 23, 2023September 23, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Invitations

Yesterday I was taking pictures in our yard when I was surprised to see a bee come out of a jasmine flower.

Iris invited to open in early morning light.

Rumi:

Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon’s reflections.

Posted on September 22, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

The Mountain

This morning I decided to drive to the top of Mt. Tam and walk around the circle at the top. When I got out of the car, the smell of the mountain plants in fall was beautifully overwhelming and filling. As I stepped onto the trail, I smelled the smoke from fires to the north. No view of San Francisco or the ocean today!

Looking from the mountaintop to the south

Smoke adds taste and smell to blue sky and clouds

The trail is still wet from early morning fog

A mountain home reverencing adventures of the past

Posted on September 22, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Landing

In Sensory Awareness, we often ask ourselves or another: Have you landed?

And usually I feel how much more landing can occur, how much more “coming down” and feeling energy, movement, and exchange there can be. How present am I?

Today I’m with transitions, noticing when I walk through an entry or doorway. I pause and contemplate as I invite immersion to journey within me as I enter a new room, a new place. Moving from indoors to out, or outdoors to in, is revelatory as to integrating liquidity and solidity in space.

I try to avoid politics here but lately it seems to require even more landing as I try to digest how close Trump came to a coup, and how even now he continues to try to destroy this democracy.

From Heather Cox Richardson today:

The extremists are bolstered by former president Donald Trump, who posted on his social media platform today that the Republicans in Congress “can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government…. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!”

Experts say shutting down the government would not, in fact, end the former president’s legal troubles, but he is actually doing more than that here: he is trying to assert dominance over the country. As Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said: “Let’s be clear about what the former president is saying here. House Republicans should shut down the government unless the prosecutions against him are shut down. He would deny paychecks to millions of working families & devastate the US economy, all in the service of himself.”

It is for each of us to continue landing within what we know is true as destructiveness and lies dissolve in the swelling oceans of truth.

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Equinox

It’s the time of noticing balance and harvest. Eyes brighten with the oranges of pumpkins, the yellows of squash., the culmination of spring and summer.

The Biden administration has announced the creation of the American Climate Corps, “a group of more than 20,000 young Americans who will learn to work in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience while also earning good wages and addressing climate change”.

Who could be against it?

The Bay area has been inundated with smoke from fires further north. I think most areas of the country have experienced increasing awareness of climate issues this year.

I’m with the words of Andrea Gibson:

I don’t have a single plan for my life more important than learning to love people well.

Of course, that begins with learning to love ourselves and the air we breathe in and out, the planet we share.

Posted on September 19, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

One Planet

My husband and I traveled a great deal in Asia back in the day. Now, my son is traveling in Kuwait and Oman. He’s there on business as were we. I now know camels don’t spit, are friendly and sweet, and certainly they are beautiful animals adapted to their environment. Chris slept alone under the stars. What a gift!