Posted on 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.

Turning round and round, turned

Posted on 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.”

Keep turning and churning as blades response to wind
Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Leadership

I‘m going through journals and notes from the past with intention to release and not store, collect, hide, and neglect. How do I open to what’s here, and step more firmly, clearly, and lightly into my own life?

I’m inspired by Sir Laurens van der Post. Living from 1906 to 1996, he was a writer, farmer, soldier, political adviser to British prime ministers, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer, and conservationist.

He wrote:

“The age of the leaders has come and gone. Every person must be their own leader now. You must remove the projection, and contain the spirit of the time in your own life and your own nature, because to go the old way and follow your leader is a form of psychological imprisonment.” 

He watched the Bushmen and wrote: “Art, poetry, and music are matters of survival. They are guardians and makers of the unbroken chain of what’s oldest and first in the human spirit.”

What calls us here?

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Embrace

Joan Halifax:

We derive nourishment from our ancestral past. In a Ute song, it is said, “In our bones is the rock itself, in our blood is the river, our skin contains the shadow of every living thing we ever came across. This is what we brought with us long ago.

We are the sum of our ancestors. Our roots stretch back to blue-green algae; they stretch to the stars. They ultimately reach the void.

Between the great original emptiness, the ancestral void, and the body that reads these words, there stand numberless generations of inorganic and organic forms. As geological history is written on a canyon wall, this history is inscribed on our psyches.

Silence and solitude enjoin us to remember our whole and great body.

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Softening

Yesterday Tiger’s spirit passed over the Rainbow Bridge.  I see how the term comes from the light of passing shining through our tears.

Today I feel a softening in the grief as though my heart is melting like butter. 

A friend reminds me of all that happened in my life while Tiger and Bella were here.  Tiger really never came back to himself after Bella passed, so the vet said this could be grief for the loss of his womb mate that led to yesterday.  He is at peace.

Tiger

The cat in charge of the office of the vet

Posted on by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

At the Vet

I was at the vet with Tiger this morning. He’s 16 years old and the vet can feel a mass. He’ll have a sonogram at two today to discover what’s wrong and what can or cannot be done.

How do we understand and deal with the weight of grief?

Mural at The Cat Clinic
To the right on the mural – wait for it!
The mouse is safe!
Easter Peonies

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Pilgrimage

These days, with age, there is so much change. Where before, I pursued travel as necessary for pilgrimage, now I feel each breath journey in and out.

From Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen , Lama Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds:

Just as a white summer cloud, in harmony with heaven and earth freely floats in the blue sky from horizon to horizon following the breath of the atmosphere – in the same way the pilgrim abandons himself to the breath of the greater life that … leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present within him though yet hidden from his sight.  

I only saw the flower when I took the picture and not the bee
Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Ease

In an article in the summer issue of Parabola Magazine, Benson Bobrick writes about his relationship with P.L. Travers who wrote Mary Poppins and studied with G.I. Gurdjieff.  These quotes come from letters she wrote to him and his former wife.

 “Let ideas just go into you.” 

 “By “standing under” I mean to let it come down upon you as you would if you were willingly and restfully standing under the rain. Or sunshine, if you like.  Be defenseless. Do not ‘try’ so hard …. The trying can become merely muscular; the mind has muscular gestures as well as the body. Let the ladder, as it were, draw you up rather than forcefully putting your foot on each rung.”

What an image.  Let the ladder, as it were, draw you up rather than forcefully putting your foot on each rung.”

I lift like Mary Poppins floating up into the sky.

What resides inside the trunk of a tree, inside the trunk of me –

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

The Weight of Thought

I’m in reflective mode these days, noticing, receiving, contemplating. I’m with this:

What is the weight of thought on my tissues?  Is it heavy or light?  Can I change it?  Do I want to?  Do I need to?   I’ve been noticing the weight of thought on my bodily tissues.  If it interests you, notice, and see what comes.  

In noticing, I feel and applaud the weight and lightness of my ancestry move through me. I evolve complexity and simplicity, compassion and understanding.

As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in The Art of Living:

Breathing in, I see all my ancestors in me: my mineral ancestors, plant ancestors, mammal ancestors, and human ancestors. My ancestors are always present, alive in every cell of my body, and I play a part in their immortality.