This is an American holiday, and perhaps appreciated more this year when the independence so fought for is threatened. We know life is movement and change but I think most of us see it as movement forward not backward. I see the date, the fourth, as going forth.
Amidst all that’s happening, I return to the questions the philosopher Spinoza suggested we ask ourselves each night.
What inspired me today?
Where did I experience peace, balance, comfort, or satisfaction?
What made me happy today, what, not who?
May we all travel forth on the Fourth.
Cormorant drying his or her wings on FridayThe bay draws our eyes, inspires
As much as we’re all shaking from yesterday’s events, I note it is Republican women who have come forth, who are speaking out.Inspiration!! And the truth comes out despite threats and intimidation. The hearings were moved up to protect Cassidy, and we’re all watching even more closely and carefully now.
Yesterday I watched the first hour of the hearings, watched Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony on what happened on January 6th. I was shaking, shaken as I often am by what has been happening. I watched while it was happening on January 6th, and I felt what Trump was doing was obvious and clear, so I’m not surprised or shocked by her testimony. I also note that those who testify under oath reveal what those who asked to be pardoned refuse to say.
That said, today, I wake aware that the saying of support, “and the sky is blue” brings to me words of even more support. The earth is turning, always turning, at least within our lifetimes. Can we tune into that turning, feel the motion, see it as one does when pausing allows one to see the movement of the sun from east to west, the changing shadows in the trees?The earth is turning and we are turning, opening to and being given new views.
Awareness – sensory awareness. Yesterday I participated in Stefan’s offering where he spoke of generosity, the generosity in seeing, and allowing what’s here to come to us. In my home, I see what I’ve gathered and created, what’s been given to me, and how I choose to arrange and display the gifts.
The earth is generous; the universe is generous. In this circling motion, this opportunity, may we allow ourselves to be nurtured on truth revealed and spinning on looms we create and perceive.
If you are interested in Stefan’s work, you will find him here.
I’m reading The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh. The book shows how capitalism leads to domination and destruction of this sensitive planet, a living system on which we depend.
On the subject of our use of fossil fuels and how they affect the environment, he begins with a steam-powered battleship called the Nemesis that allowed the British to destroy the Chinese navy in 1840.
“Since then the use of fossil fuels in war-making has risen in a steep curve. During the Second World War the American military’s consumption of petroleum amounted to one gallon of petroleum per soldier per day; during the first Gulf War this rose to four gallons per soldier per day; in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rate of consumption surged to sixteen gallons per soldier per day.”
“Today the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of energy in the United States – and probably in the world. The U.S. military maintains vast fleets of vehicles, ships, and aircraft, and many of these consume huge amounts of fossil fuels. A non-nuclear aircraft carrier consumes 5,621 gallons of fuel per hour; in other words, those vessels burn up as much fuel in one day as a small midwestern town might use in a year. But a single F-16 aircraft consumes a third as much fuel in one hour of ordinary operations – around 1,700 gallons. If the plane’s afterburners are engaged, it consumes two and a half times as much fuel per hour as an aircraft carrier – 14,400 gallons. The U.S.Air Force has around a thousand F-16’s, and they are but a small part of the air fleet.”
“In the 1990’s the three branches of the U.S. military consumed approximately 25 billions tons of fuel per year. This was more than a fifth of the country’s total consumption, and “more than the total commercial energy consumption of nearly two thirds of the world’s countries”. During the years of the Iraq War, the U.S. military was consuming around 1.3 billion gallons of oil annually for its Middle Eastern operations alone.”
The author continues with statistics and points out the Department of Defense “generates 500,000 tons of toxic waste annually, more than the top five US chemical companies combined, and it is estimated that the armed forces of the major world powers produce the greatest amount of hazardous waste in the world.”
As we struggle to get money for climate change, we and other countries continue to fund the military without question even though the military is well aware of the dangers of climate change. They’re already dealing with the problems of sea-level rise affecting many of their bases. In addition, “In 2018 Hurricane Michael struck the Tyndall Air Force base in Florida with great force, damaging seventeen jets, each worth a third of a billion dollars.”
This book is depressing and I’m reading it slowly but I think we all need to be aware of our increasing dependence on the military and how both political parties vote to support their insatiable demands.
Are we spending money in a way that makes sense when it comes to continuing to live on an inhabitable planet?Not all of us are going to want to, or be able to, head out to Mars.I like it here.
This morning Samantha Wallen of Write in Power invites me to look around and notice something I don’t pay much attention to. I note that my printer sits on the desk, a heavy presence, patient, waiting until I decide something needs a harder form, something I can hold in my hands.
Is that where unsettlement comes from, that place of waiting, and now I hear a chirp. The nest has little birds and they’re waking up.
Attention is the doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity.
Amidst all that’s happening, I’m reading The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh.
It shows the conflict between native people living in harmony with Mother Earth and those who seek to domesticate, dominate, murder, and control.
I’ll give an example from the book of our horrific past in this country that demonstrates what happened this week with a Supreme Court now dominated by those who lied to be on it.
“The differences between European and Indian conception of living on the land have never been more eloquently summarized than by the Oglala Lakota chief Standing Bear: “We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as ‘wild’. Only to the white man was Nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land infested with ‘wild animals’ and ‘savage’ people. To us, it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.”
Ghosh continues: “These contrasting conceptions, suggests the Native American botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, were ultimately founded on radically different stories about the world, like those of Skywoman and Eve.” She writes:
“On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden … That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.”
The summer fog pours in Cat’s Feet or Lion’s Roar?
The days are long with light. I’m continuously looking up into the sky. This morning I saw the moon and shining planets. My daughter-in-law’s father passed away at this time of Solstice, the sun so brightly overhead for those of us in the northern hemisphere. I feel it as a beacon for him as he releases his body and like a caterpillar leaving its chrysalis to become a butterfly moves on where we can’t see.
I’m with passage and grief, the heart overflowing with entry into what we can’t understand and yet we look upward and within, touched deeply with the meaning we sense and know is there.
Years ago I took a workshop with Anne C. Klein. Now I read her words from “Revisiting Ritual”.
Our mind wanders incessantly, but our body and senses are always in the present. To investigate our embodied experience is to investigate the living present.
I’m with what it is to investigate the living present, and in that to juice the sacred within, to feel the touch of lungs on heart swinging through like monkeys in trees, branching and expanding the roles we share.
The octopus has three hearts and nine brains, a central brain and one in each of its eight arms. We have ten fingers. What might we stretch and embrace to reach even beyond what we see?
On Juneteeth, we remember that157 years ago, white Americans enslaved African Americans because of the color of their skin.We remember and change.
I wake enchanted with how a child finds a branched stick and then a hole perfect for insertion, and then, trying different rocks finds two just right to create a story about a bird in a nest.
Yesterday we were talking about the problem of the homeless, the range of reasons. How do we help each one?
We begin with the children. We have the money to educate each child in the way that most nourishes their intellect and encourages their creativity. Don’t we have room for diversity in problem solving as we honor the abundance of ways each of us participates in our intake and outtake of the world?
The bunkers and tunnels in the Marin Headlands were once used for defense of the Golden Gate. Now, they provide views and a place to count hawks as they migrate.
Walking to even more viewsTesting Ah, yes, this rock fits the branch Rodeo Beach and the Marin Mammal Center Bears celebrate the Warriors win at The Overlook Herb Caen’s “Baghdad by the Bay”
Today we walked half-way across the Golden Gate Bridge on a beautiful day. We went up to Hawk Hill. Grandchild found a stick and a hole. Add two rocks and a home for a bird in her nest appeared. Life works like that.
What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest.
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