I’ve been inspired by the creative responses to the pandemic.When I got my two shots of the vaccine at the Civic Center, I was reminded of the years of county fairs I attended there. When my sons were young, their various exhibits entered by the schools won prizes and ribbons. In their categories, every child won something.
Now, I read that live drive-in opera is coming to the Civic Center. The fair this year, like last year, is cancelled, but we have drive-in opera instead. My heart lifts in the notes, high and low, that carry us along.
“Below a certain “critical” temperature, materials undergo transition into the superconducting state, characterized by two basic properties: firstly, they offer no resistance to the passage of electrical current. When resistance falls to zero, a current can circulate inside the material without any dissipation of energy. Secondly, provided they are sufficiently weak, external magnetic fields will not penetrate the superconductor, but remain at its surface”.
Reading that, I feel a resonance and understanding of the following words of Thomas Merton.
I feel how when the heat of motion, reactivity, and vibration calm, we come to “the peace of inner clarity and love”.
Thomas Merton: In a world of noise, confusion and conflict, it is necessary that there is a place of inner silence and peace, not the peace of mere relaxation but the peace of inner clarity and love.
I’ve always felt the old adage that “sticks and stones may hurt my bones but words can never hurt me” was wrong, sadly and tragically wrong and untrue.
Words can hurt, and we’ve probably all flung them one way or another, at ourselves, or at others, especially those we love.
This morning I read Sharon Olds poem, “Looking South at Lower Manhattan Where the Towers Had Been”. It took me where I didn’t expect, and when I clicked to hear her read it, I also came across her poem “Pine Tree Ode”. I suggest you read and listen to both as a way to sink and rise even more deeply and fully into this world we share.
This morning I lay in bed and felt the sinking, the need to rearrange to meet this new day –
The words of Baal Shem Tov came:
Let me fall if I must. The one I will become will catch me.
I read Alan Watts and think of how we practice the following when we play tennis or ski or mindfully live the moments of the day.
If you expect something to come in a certain way, you position yourself to get ready for it. If it comes in another way, by the time you reposition your energy, it is too late. So stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
Seventeen month old grandson is coming for the weekend with his parental units so the Bunny is hopping around here this morning. I see colorful eggs everywhere, and a stuffed bunny and bunny ears for Keo.
He loves basketball so the Bunny left a basketball hoop here last night with three orange balls.
It’s Keo-Time!
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
I’m home again and as I consider what poem beckons me today, it’s the sound of hot water dripping through coffee grounds. That sound passes into taste.
Yesterday morning I had breakfast at the Residence Inn in Menlo Park. For some strange and unknown reason a TV was on in the breakfast room blaring out the morning news. Two little boys, around eight years old, stood there aghast as they watched a video showing two young children being dropped over a border wall in New Mexico. Then the trial of the murderer of George Floyd came on.
I hate to be an “in my day” sort of person but my parents read the newspaper and probably watched the 6:00 news. We read the newspaper when our children were young. Now, of course, we read the news from a variety of sources on-line. I’m sure there was awareness, as there should be, in both generations of the horrors that occurred, but certainly not an onslaught as the first meal of the day is consumed.
We’ve had a heat wave which today draws the fog onto the ridge. It’s a new day and I’m grateful for my home and a month that celebrates poetry in a myriad of ways.
Morning with the moon a gift in the sky The fog blows in and then softens out
It’s poetry month and I’m reading ways to celebrate. One way is to choose a poem and read it outdoors. I think of what the trees and birds might want to hear today and come to balancing on weaving waves of silence. I listen to the leaves unfold as the birds draw them outwards with their notes.
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes — ah, that is where the art resides.
– Artur Schnabel
The only thing we have to bring to community is ourselves, so the contemplative process of recovering our true selves in solitude is never selfish. It is ultimately the best gift we can give to others.
I’m spending time in Menlo Park to be with my 17 month old grandson who is pure delight. Yesterday he fell asleep against my heart and we were that way together until I turned him to watch his sleeping face and then put him in bed to sleep. One wonders how one can hold a child, any child, and not want everything possible for each one.
May we all look upon this trickster sort of day as a way to know what is true and what matters in this world we share.Each one of us is precious and fragile in our nourished strength.
On a day that is exquisite with trees filling space with buds and leaves, and birds singing and sweeping through the air, I read this from Heather Cox Richardson:
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed his state’s new voter suppression law last night in a carefully staged photo op. As journalist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, Kemp sat at a polished table, with six white men around him, under a painting of the Callaway Plantation on which more than 100 Black people had been enslaved. As the men bore witness to the signing, Representative Park Cannon, a Black female lawmaker, was arrested and dragged away from the governor’s office.
I put it with the news of a week or so ago. in a decree approved by Pope Francis, the Vatican said that priests cannot bless same-sex unions, describing such relationships as “not ordered to the Creator’s plan.”
The church said, “The blessing of homosexual unions cannot be considered licit”.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen change, and then, these two things happen and I’m caught in a collision of what seems to be so obvious, evident and true – the need for equality and freedom for all, and then there’s these broken and disintegrating steps unaligned with what I believe the majority of people think and feel.
We can know this is a last gasp effort to leave control in the hands of a few, and still it’s hard, and yet, people are gathering in vigils of solidarity and peace. I focus there and on opening leaves and birds calling and building nests.
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