I woke this morning permeated with Einstein’s words:
“There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
I met a friend yesterday for a walk to Tennessee Valley Beach. We were the only ones to walk through wind and mist to arrive in a sheltered place up near the rocks. And then the sky cleared, and still we were the only ones there, and the tide came in up close to us and then went out.
Hours passed as we spoke of life and death and what it means to us to be “here” right now, this moment, blessed!
I’m writing postcards reminding or perhaps encouraging Democrats who voted in Virginia in 2020 to vote again in the upcoming VA election.
I think of the joy of writing a letter, hand-writing, then folding and placing it in an envelope to sail through the mail, and then, envision it unfolded and opened by another.
Shared touch that seems different than a text or email though information both ways is shared.
I’ve been noticing how sunlight lights and sparkles the line of quartz in rocks I treasure. I have a children’s book that describes rocks like this as “Wishing Rocks”. Therefore, I move my finger along the line circling the middle of the rock and wish even as I imagine what it is like to be enfolded in a different kind of stone.
Each morning I read a poem written daily by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer. Her son took his life recently, and she took a break from writing and sharing her poems, and now she writes of love and grief. Her poems break open my heart, and sometimes I can’t go all the way through, and then, because I know it is essential, I do.
It’s Indigenous People’s Day, a time to reflect back on what was taken by force and cruelty. I’d like to add ignorance but perhaps that is too kind.
On Saturday, our family gathered on Coast Miwok land to watch the Blue Angels. The Miwok used to travel across the bay in tule boats. Now, jets scream overhead as birds show how serene flight can be.
Logically I can say that environmentally and financially “Fleet Week” makes no sense, but when I hear the roar and see the flash of blue and yellow so precariously, yet harmoniously flying overhead, I lift on the sight of speed, forgetting the cost.
I’m with the words of Thich Nhat Hanh:
Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
We’re considering moving to gather family closer together. A friend asks if I could leave Mount Tam.
Maria Popova describes Mount Tam as “the first vertebrae of the mountainous backbone of the Americas that stretches all the way to Tierra del Fuego”.
She celebrates Etel Adman who painted and wrote about Mt. Tam.
Etel Adman: In this unending universe Tamalpais is a miraculous thing, the miracle of matter itself: something we can single out, the pyramid of our own identity. We are, because it is stable and it is ever changing. Our identity is the series of the mountain’s becomings, our peace is its stubborn existence.
Can I leave her, move down the line of vertebrae? When I went to Nepal, I felt Mt. Tam sent me there, sent me to her sister mountains, mountains connected at the root.Where might she send me now?
On Saturday I was with my grandson who is almost two. We played a game where we placed a small block on our head, and then leaned left orright and off it fell and we did it again and again.
Where do I lean now to stretch and gather laughter like an opened cloak?
Etel Adman: “When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive.”
HarvestSan Francisco from Cavallo Point on Saturday Afternoon Sunday Morning – fog wafts in, then out
Each day my inbox contains a covey of inspiring quotes. I’m hoisted, flown, and carried on words to open and release. Today something different comes, a quote by Francis Picabia, a French painter:
Our heads are round so thoughts can change direction.
I think of trees, open 360 degrees.
Sculpture Bench in Old Mill Park Big Wave Bench by Artist and Arborist Chuck Oakander
I try to leave politics off this blog only suggesting periodically that you read Heather Cox Richardson but this paragraph today – I wish I understood how the people that planned and instigated what happened on January 6th aren’t in jail for treason and I don’t.
From HCR today:Los Angeles Times reporter Sarah D. Wire noted that the rioters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 ran more than 100 feet past 15 reinforced windows, “making a beeline” to four windows that had been left unreinforced in a renovation of the building between 2017 and 2019. They found the four windows, located in a recessed part of the building, Wire wrote, “by sheer luck, real-time trial and error, or advance knowledge by rioters.”
Transformation is so clear this time of year, well, every time of year really, every time of day, moment by moment. I’m not sure why I feel more alert these days but there’s something about the ripening of pumpkins that speaks to me, hollows me out with the rounding need to expand and stem.
Yesterday in a book by Flora Thompson, I read about a children’s game where the children find a place outside and touch the earth lightly, and bounce up and come down, singing, “We are bubbles of earth. Bubbles of earth. Bubbles of earth.”
I’m inspired to see myself as a bubble of earth.
Thich Nhat Hanh says that, “When we are able to take one step peacefully, happily, we are for the cause of peace and happiness for the whole of humankind.”
That seems especially key these days especially as thoughts are with the oil spill off Huntington Beach and all the creatures at risk.
The root of the word transform is “to move into beauty”.
May this be so!
Stinson Beach on a foggy day, which is not today –
Today is a beautiful autumn day. I think of pumpkins ripening in the fields, gathering sunlight, nourishing seeds even as there is that huge open space inside.
I’m with these words of Joseph Campbell:
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
What resilience and trust that requires, and yet there is an energy to it too. What comes now as the light changes inside and out. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
And in these staggeringly complex times, Jimmy Carter guides us with his words:
“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.”
It’s the first day of my birth month. Each year, there’s something that reminds me of that preparation in the womb. There are more years behind me than ahead. This morning Steve and I discuss re-reading Sogyal Rinpoche’s book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Yes, we may have many years ahead of us, and we are aware.
I’m with the words of Rilke: “Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly, they are passed unopened.” I want to open them all guided by the words of Maya Angelou.
The desire to reach the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.
This morning I was out watering at a time in the summer it would be light but instead the darkness was lit by the moon and stars. All was quiet and still, and for some reason, Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence moved through me.
My cat Bella is now on antibiotics and eating a few bites, but in my worry I’ve been with the words that complete the poem “In Blackwater Woods” written by the late Mary Oliver.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Recently I learned that the strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue. This tells us why we must be so careful with our words, words we say to ourselves and to others.
It’s a beautiful fall morning. My father, born in 1921, would have been 100 today. He died in an accident in 1969. He was 47, the age my oldest son is now. Time. Trust. Today I’m with James Wright’s beautiful poem “A Blessing”. There are so many ways to step out of our bodies and into blossom.
A Blessing
Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
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