My Story! – Page 66 – Cathy's Blog!

Posted on May 7, 2022 by Cathy Edgett

Mother’s Day Weekend

Birth is happening all around us. Mother Earth is springing to life. For those of us whose mothers have passed, there’s a bit of sadness in the weekend celebration and there’s also the knowing that life continues even as we release those we love.

I feel my ribs as they float the canoe of my being, heart stable and expansive in its ability to curve and flow pumping in and out.

I just finished a book by Jeanne Achterberg, Woman as Healer. From prehistoric times to the present, there’s been peace, growth, and prosperity when women were honored and revered for their role as healers and creators, as essential beings in this world we share. When they were held down, dishonored, and demeaned, there was war.

I’d not realized the numbers of women burned at the stake during the Middle Ages. Women were feared for their knowledge of herbs and healing, and destroyed.

A neighbor shares that ten monarch butterflies just hatched from milkweed she planted. What a gift as we honor and acknowledge we each have our own right to choose how we best serve, nourish and create.

Posted on May 6, 2022 by Cathy Edgett

Tender

Today I’m with what it is to support another, to be a tender, a boat or larger ship that serves and supports other ships. Perhaps it’s easy for a ship’s captain to know what is needed, but when it comes to helping others it becomes more complex.

How do we help another? How are we a tender to another’s needs?

There are times where our hearts may ache to “do” something and yet, sometimes less is more, and so we stay quietly with our own pain and grief, and allow its expansion into a wider world. There, there is more embrace than we can even know, so each moment open out with ease and grace to all that is here and shared.

Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.

– Confucius

Posted on May 3, 2022 by Cathy Edgett

What’s Happening Here

As I sort through years of accumulation of poems, wisdom, inspiration, I feel an energetic shift in the room, a spaciousness in the room and in myself. As I organize, recycle, and toss, I think of how a fire needs space to burn. When we make a fire, we leave space around and between the logs. There is a foundation, a plan, and with that these words of Seneca swirl in with direction, warmth, and light .

If we don’t know what port we’re steering for, no wind is favorable.

Meanwhile the little bird chirps from her nest from morning to night. I feel accompanied by her chirps as she sits on her nest. Her nest is below this room in which I sit. She makes the world seem balanced and right.

I wrote the above last night and then this morning I come to Robert B. Hubbell and what the overturning of Roe vs. Wade means to all of us. It’s just the beginning of erosion and destruction of our rights, rights so painfully won.

Then I read this poem by Susan Vespoli, “Twenty Photos from Police Records of His Last Night Alive”. She’s writing about her son. She says about the poem:

“This past week, I received photos and body-cam video from police records of my son Adam’s last night on the planet before he was shot by a police officer. Adam and three other homeless individuals, one in a wheelchair, one leaning on a cane, were charged with a misdemeanor for ‘obstructing streets or public areas.’ Because my son questioned the police’s right to arrest them for sleeping, he was thrown to the ground, charged with ‘resisting arrest’ and hauled into jail for the night. The next day, he was shot. I am writing to give a voice to all the human beings who sleep without homes and who are treated this way.”

You can read the poem here: https://www.rattle.com

Posted on May 1, 2022 by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Going Home

In going through my journals, I come across these words and this experience by Dawn Prince-Hughes. She has Aspergers. In wanting to understand human communication, she began sitting outside the window of the enclosure for the silverback gorillas at the Seattle zoo. One day she arrived upset. Congo, a silverback male gorilla noticed and rushed to the window. He motioned to her to put her head on his shoulder. They touched through the glass and felt the glass as fluid.

She says: I probably stayed with him like that, with my head on his shoulder, for 30 minutes or so. I think it was probably the first time I was genuinely comforted by another person. Congo really set the standard for what social interactions should be like between me and another human being. You just can’t worry about looking like a fool. You can’t worry about getting hurt. You can’t worry about whether you’re right or not. It just boils down to wanting to be connected at all costs, at all risks. I no longer wanted to allow the permeability of my spirit to seek smaller and smaller shelters. It requires a completely open heart. I felt like I found a way to go home through the glass.

Posted on May 1, 2022 by Cathy Edgett

Rounding About

Our book group formed many years ago around a love of Jane Austen and Dickens though the first book we read was Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Discussing that book, we learned more about each other than people we’d known for years. We knew we’d found something, at least some of us. There were seven of us on the first trip to England. A friend just asked about the book group trip so I go through a photo album and snap photos through plastic to find a few of our first trip.

Our second trip, minus one member who passed away the year before, we spent a week on a canal boat which was quite an adventure. We were the entertainment as we navigated through narrow locks with a 70 foot boat. We spent the second week on a walking trip through the Cotswolds followed by time in London.

This friend asks what I’m looking for in going back through the past. I respond that I’m circling back to remember with reverence this life I’ve been given. I’m preparing for my transition which could be now, or twenty or thirty years from now, but I see and feel this as a time to gather and honor all I’ve been given, as I circle and center in Heart, Essence, Source.

Sally drove our rental van and provided a container to hold luggage for six!

Posted on May 1, 2022 by Cathy Edgett · 1 Comment

May Day

This morning I’m listening to one bird in particular who is a joyous eruption of chirps and song. Last night we realized there is a nest on the lamp next to the door down below. One year a nest was built into the dryer vent. Another year a nest with eggs rested on top of the electrical box. With the pandemic, we didn’t drive the outside car and when we opened the hood to charge the battery, there was a perfect little nest, now empty. This year the nest is right outside a door we use daily, but it seems we’re cleared as safe.

I think the critters have a sign like hoboes used to mark a place for food. Our Welcome Here Mat is out.

Steve sits on the deck down below at night and a skunk or two wander by, an opossum, and sometimes raccoons. Certainly the squirrels are year-round residents, and at night Steve listens to an owl as he exchanges calls with two other birds.

Life here is peaceful.

I’m reading Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins. He shares his family move from San Francisco to Hay-on-Wye in Wales, a town with forty bookstores.

When my book group went to England, we went to Hay-on-Wye, “the book capital of the world”. We spent time in Bath in honor of Jane Austen, and time in Stratford on Avon for Shakespeare, and there I found Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters.

Books and birds delight this first day of May.

Posted on April 30, 2022 by Cathy Edgett

Gifts

I rise early this morning, and go outside to see the early morning alignment of four planets. Stars are sparkling through the redwood tree like Christmas lights, and then across the southern sky, I see a shooting star.

Crickets are chirping and soon the birds begin.

Yesterday we were at the Children’s Discovery Museum with our grandchild – another gift.

And not just a gift of our grandchild, but the gift of children exploring, climbing, playing, sharing.

It’s the last day of April and tomorrow is May 1st, May Day. As a child, on this day, we made baskets and filled them with candy and flowers to hang on neighbor’s doorknobs to celebrate the longer days.

I’m still going through paperwork from the past. I come across my certificates for “graduating” from chemotherapy, and then radiation. Both certificates are signed by the nurses who cared for me. I give thanks.

May we each feel and fill with delight like May baskets. May we savor what sings around us on earth and in the sky.

Posted on April 27, 2022April 27, 2022 by Cathy Edgett

This Time of Year

I gather quotes like flowers, inhale, exhale, the freshness of words vibrating in spring air.

Hildegard of Bingen: “You are a flowering orchard.”

How clear that seems in spring. There’s one particular bird – a little guy who sings and chirps continuously from one tree and then another. His song wraps around me, entwines, dissolving what divides.

Carl Jung: Where insight rules beyond differences, all the pairs of opposites come together.

Rilke: Do not be bewildered by the surfaces – in the depths all becomes law.

Rumi: Open your hands if you want to be held.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: He lives most life whoever breathes most air.

Marion Woodman: The crone is the maturing of the feminine, in both men and women. Here, there is no concern with power, nothing left to lose. The crone finds herself a tuning fork among others, bringing them into center.

Can this tiny singing bird be a crone? I center in the sounds.

Annie Dillard asks, What does it feel like to be alive? And answers: Living, you stand under a waterfall.

Section of the redwood trunk sans squirrel in the moment

Posted on April 26, 2022April 26, 2022 by Cathy Edgett

Gifts

My posts may seem unusual for a while as I’m going back through writing from twenty-five years ago. What was I exploring? I was learning that allowing myself to be received is an act of giving, so here I am. Receive.

I asked myself “questions as bait”, as ways to wake. Try it. It’s fun!

Questions as Bait

How do I hang rainbows from the sun?

How do lips climb?

How do I fold and unfold my heart – origami sails for sea and sky?

How do I lick the sky like blueberry pie?

How do I empower joy, and lift my heart on a bench to look out at the world from a cloud?

Can I be like anemone,

fed from air, like sea?

I said to myself each day: I am a commitment to birthing a focus for my life each moment, each day, a changing lens knowing that for the Dalai Lama, and therefore for what I intend, kindness and awareness are the same thing.

At the time, I came upon a young boy loading fish from a stream into a cooler. He then carried the cooler with the fish up the stream to a pond he had dug. He was trying to save the fish from the usual summer drought. I think of intention, beauty, kindness, diversity, survival.

I would have forgotten this episode if I hadn’t written it down on paper, a layer received from a tree.

When my niece was young, she waltzed her semi-personally created character through Toon Town on the computer. I could see her hand-eye coordination creating new pathways in the brain, and activating what may lie dormant in me. It was like learning a new language, an opportunity to interact with others in a virtual, and yet, emotionally satisfying way.

Now, she, too, is a lens for me, as I turn the kaleidoscope of my life round and round.

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Cathy Edgett

Learning

T.H. White set his book The Once and Future King, a book about King Arthur, in a different time period than what we historically and mythically know. He used Le Morte d’Arthur, as a source, though he re-interprets it from the perspective of a world recovering from World War II. What advice might he give?

In the book, this is the advice Merlyn gives Arthur.

“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your house trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”