Yesterday Monarch butterflies accompanied my walk and today birds were out enjoying the early morning marsh. I saw avocets, willets, egrets, ducks, gulls, and smaller birds. The special treat was a Heron in the reeds.
Nature’s Gifts
September
These last four months of the year go together as beginning, harvest, fruition, celebration, and rest.
I feel myself in the pause as though just being is enough. Last night I sat outside with the stars and crescent moon. During the day, I sat under a maple tree looking up. This morning seeing light arrive later, I light within. I am candle, illumination, trust.
Rumi:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Connection
When our book, Breast Strokes, came out, Jane and I gave a reading at Books Inc.
Though I was nervous beforehand, ridiculously so, when we began and shared what we knew, I enjoyed it. I signed up for Toastmasters to deal with pre-nerves.
I was launched into a club of friendliness, fun, and support: Club 1441.
The last of the three founding members passed away in June. What’s important to note about Toastmasters and change is that in 1970, Helen Blanchard was the first woman to join a Toastmasters club. She did so by signing up under a man’s name, “Homer Blanchard”. Admitting women was allowed in 1973, three years later.
In 1980, there were no clubs In Marin that would admit women, so Ed Sotelo and his wife Eleanor formed Club 1441 so they could participate together. The club, vibrant, adaptable, and alive, continues today surviving the pandemic by meeting on Zoom.
Today I read about a Supreme Court justice raised to believe men are superior to women, dominant. My mind is boggled.
I come to Etty Hillesum who wrote from a concentration camp in 1943:
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves.
And so I come to an article on bees. Bees are sentient beings, and perhaps we already knew that but this article shows to what an exhilarating extent.
The more we learn, the more we celebrate all that connects us, our interdependence and essential, individual contribution, whether male, female, human, plant, or bee.
As Alan Watts wrote:
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
Art
Yesterday I went to the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts to see Holly Wong’s Guardian of the Spirits, a “suspended installation of cellophane, dichroic film, silk and polyester organza, gold fabric, vinyl tablecloth, transparencies and thread”. That may sound strange but it’s a beautiful, flowing, clear and patterned airiness. It moves as one walks by, and then, guarded by the spirits, one looks up to the second floor, and there overhanging is a long gun sticking out from the turret of a tank. Walking up, one sees the tank with a teensy-tiny Russian flag atop is breaking through a wall. The flag of Ukraine hangs from the gun.
Art!
Heart stops and beats even more receptively again.
Circling
Joni Mitchell’s song The Circle Game is whirling through my head. And “we go round and round in the circle game”.
I’m doing eye exercises which makes me aware of the roundness of the eyeball and how I can use exercises to stimulate and visualize movement and fluidity there. I’m widening and nourishing how I see, how I receive. It’s about intimacy with ourselves and with the world.
The earth is round, twirling, and circling the sun. We are motion and movement spinning change.
Charlotte Selver, my teacher of Sensory Awareness, work I came to in 1993, said of the work:
“This work is a very spiritual work. It has to do with waking up, with getting spirited to the last molecule. Spirited. Because it sits everywhere in us. Everywhere.”
Everywhere!
Enjoy the curves, awakening the spirit in living aware.
Celebration
This morning is dark and cold, well, it feels cold to me. It may still be August but the smell and feel of Fall fills the air.
I’m celebrating and integrating these words of Audre Lorde:
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
Inspiration
I just watched the movie Thirteen Lives. Truly inspiring. It shows what love and courage, and people gathered together can too. It would seem unbelievable and yet it is true.
A Gift
I’ve settled into wearing glasses and am loving the fun of it. I’m playing with eye exercises, trusting what a delight it is to have air touch my eyes directly rather than through a contact lens.
I hadn’t realized all that is involved with contact lenses but now fluids are put away to give away and I’m adjusting to new ways of seeing. I’m using pinhole glasses which I only learned about recently. I paid $20.00 on Amazon for plastic ones with round holes. Using them, beginning with five minutes and expanding the time period stimulates peripheral vision.
The idea is to wake up the visual system and develop a sense of the visual pathways. I’m visualizing fluidity, movement, and expansion in my eyes, in my life.
In learning that pinhole glasses stimulate the retina and the pathways to the thalamus. I checked out the thalamus and I’m enthralled. I’m enjoying participating in healing and health as I await what the medical world can do when that world and I coincide.
In my pause, I reflect on and absorb these words of Eknath Easwaran:
To love, we need to be sensitive to those around us, which is impossible if we are always racing through life engrossed in all the things we need to do before sunset.
Discombobulated
Yesterday I learned that I can’t use soft contact lenses, so I will be wearing glasses until the cataract surgery which I now learn will probably be available in six months, not three. For every decade of wearing hard contacts, it takes the eye a month to adjust back, so in my case, 60 years, six months.
I know this is an opportunity, and that I’d been stuck in a rut, and so this morning I sit here – hmmm – what is my mood?
I’m extremely aware of vision these days and I feel my vision cloud when I read and watch Marjorie Taylor Green deny wind turbines and solar panels because she doesn’t “wanna have to go to bed when the sun sets”. I thought it was a joke but no, I watch her saying it, and there’s applause. After all, who wants to go back to washing their clothes in a tub? Those who expose the dangers of Trump, what he tried and is still trying to do, that those people aren’t re-elected I find sobering.
A democracy can’t survive an uneducated populace and as much as I choose to stay positive, it’s hard not to wonder about this country and how we are now viewed in the world, especially since Trump’s theft of classified information endangers us all.
And with that, I’m with the changing clouds in the sky. What a gift!
The landscape moves as do I.
Liz Cheney
I hoped Liz Cheney would win yesterday but she did not. Here is her inspiring concession speech. This is courage in action. May her words unite the country to preserve what so many have fought and died for.
Cathy's Blog! 