It’s Labor Day weekend, a celebration of the labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to development, achievement and quality of life for us all.
With the pandemic, we’ve been driving very little and using only one car, so today is the day to charge the battery on the second car and get it ready to sell. Steve opens the hood and what does he see but a pristine little nest. Talk about labor and creativity. Somehow a little bird slipped into a safe place, built a nest, and raised her tiny chicks and then slipped out. As I was holding it up, a wee bird flew over. I think she’s a wren.
And round and round we go in the Circle Game!
Nest now outside in the sun – a layer of moss softens the bottom of the nest
Because I use BallotTrax, I know that my ballot for the recall on which we should vote NO has been received and counted. I recommend signing up for it if it’s available where you live.
Inspired by Tish H. Warren in anopinion piece in the NY Times, I write a haiku.
She writes:
“Like any other life-sustaining resource,” Marilyn Chandler McEntyre writes in her book “Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies,” “language can be depleted, polluted, contaminated, eroded and filled with artificial stimulants.” She argues that language needs to be rescued and restored, and points us to the practice of reading and writing poetry as one way of doing so. Poems, she says, “train and exercise the imagination” to “wage peace” because “the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.”
Morning
Rising with the sun
Ascent an umbrella held
Rays reveal net’s dreams
Labyrinth above Rodeo Beach in August – so dry yet space to fill in the blanks
Yesterday I was in the waiting room at the vet. When I walked in, a pretty little cat was resting on the counter in a pretty little cage. I learned her name was Princess and the man who brought her in thought she could be boarded for three weeks while he was on a trip. This vet doesn’t board cats, and Kitty Charm School is full right now. It was a dilemma.
A woman sitting there with her cat named Tux because being black with white at the neck he looked like he was wearing a tuxedo offered to take Princess home with her for three weeks. The man agreed and they exchanged information. The place was rejoicing, well maybe not Tux who was sitting regally throughout the negotiation. Meanwhile Princess was present for it all dainty and assured as a princess should be.
It was such a sweet resolving of the problem, and I walked out smiling with the beauty and care of this world we share.
Since returning from Kauai, I seem entwined with waterfalls, ribboned with the link of water falling to the sea, and all that that means.
The language of Hawaii reflects the landscape. The wind and sea sound through it.
I’m reading Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of the language of her people, Potawatomi, an Anishinaabe language. One of their words is Puhpowee, which means “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight”.
She writes: “As a biologist I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You’d think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.”
She continues: “In the three syllables of this new word I could see an entire process of close observation in the morning woods, the formulation of a theory for which English has no equivalent. The makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything. I’ve cherished it for many years, as a talisman, and longed for the people who gave a name to the life force of mushrooms. The language that holds Puhpowee is one that I wanted to speak. So when I learned that the word for rising, for emergence, belonged to the language of my ancestors, it became a signpost for me.”
She goes on to explore how “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy.”
She writes of language and pronouns and concludes that what’s most important is living and speaking from the Heart!! Live there!
Water Falls to the SeaThe North coast of Kauai in August, 2021
The first morning we were on Kauai, I rose at 3 to sit in the dark and appreciate the stars and wind through the palm trees. I saw four shooting stars. I was reminded of my visit to Japan’s most sacred Shinto shrine, the Ise Grand Shrine. All is alive and entwined.
On Wednesday, I took a boat ride that left the beach at Hanalei to explore along the sacred Napali coast.
We entered a cave where a waterfall poured down from an opening above.
Perhaps these photos I took give a sense of the land we share. All of this moves in us, mountains, valleys, waterfalls, and caves.
Napali Coast Entering a CaveLeaving a cave Looking up in one of the caves
Ricky, my niece’s partner, was with us. His family escaped from Cambodia. You can check out some of what he does now on You Tube at adobofishsauce.com.
Today I’m wondering if the land we live on reaches up to hold on to us. Perhaps we are connected and entangled like the fungi strands beneath our feet.
Maybe the land enjoys and participates in our footsteps, laughter, joys, fears, and worries.
We’ve gone through all the hoops, and there were many, and it looks like we’ll be traveling tomorrow and yet I feel an attachment to this land, our home for 43 years.
What is this hold? I reflect on separation, on birth, organs, bone, and skin.
I consider the separation of an orange into parts, the sounds and squish, the squirt of juice, and I’m grateful for this gathering of family as I step away knowing wherever I go, there I am, so tender footsteps are the wayto meet and travel each day.
Last night the fog came in. This morning the wind chimes chime.
I read the news. A man kills his two young children because he thinks they are “lizard people”. How can this be?
I watch the fog move in and out, pick plums from the tree.
Evening Fog
We create anger by a series of thoughts that result in a particular emotional and physiological state. Anger doesn’t just happen to us. If we’re able to catch an angry thought as it’s budding, we can let it go.
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