Cathy's Blog!

I woke in the night and rose to meditate.  My life has been busier than I prefer and I could feel the weight in the bone dwelling over my eyes. I stayed with the weight, sensing and touching the seven bones that come together to surround and support the orbit of each eye.  

I knew there were seven but this morning I check their names.  What a list.

• Frontal bone.
• Zygomatic bone.
• Maxillary bone.
• Sphenoid bone.
• Ethmoid bone.
• Palatine bone.
• Lacrimal bone.

Knowing those bones come together to protect each eye, I sense all that goes on between my ears. I cleanse in the abundance I am, and offer intention for abundance to swell through the world like waves.

There’s more than enough for all.

Rain pounds down and enclosed, I repeat my journey through words that inspire me.

Birdwings

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror

up to where you are bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,

here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open,

you would be paralysed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,

the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated

as birdwings.

– Rumi

Be still like a mountain, flow like a river”

~ Lao Tze

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

– Annie Dillard

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

– John Updike

The rain has come again.  This is a moist year.

I read about Bernd Heinrich, a scientist and naturalist who lives in a cabin in Maine and observes those with whom he shares the land and gives them to us in his books.

I choose among his books and order Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death.

There can be a richness to the aging process, this continually grateful reception of breath, each inhalation a gift, each exhalation a letting go, and merging with the wider world of which we are part.  

Each day, my intention is to sink more clearly into living as a beginner, as babies do.  

Old and young meet in the center, centered in gratitude, gratitude for living that is always new, as both accept, receive, release, and continue to transform.  

May we all be well in this process of expanding our ability to give and receive.

I met with a friend yesterday and we discussed the aging process.  When I go in for my annual physical now, I have to draw a clock face, and then draw the hands to a time I am told.  It’s felt really silly to me until I read the poem below. I never recognized the complexity in “reading” a clock. I think I remember learning, and I remember teaching my sons.  I wonder what it is for children today that so much is digital. Maybe they can’t read a clock face. Maybe they “read” in other ways.  

I remember the first time I watched my young niece jump a unicorn in a computer game.  I could tell she understood the spatial aspects of the screen in a way I didn’t feel I ever could.

Yesterday my son, his wife, and I discussed screen time for babies and what it might do to do their brains.  It is suggested that a baby not view a screen for the first two years, and some philosophies say much later than that.  I enjoy Face Time with my grandson. Some say that isn’t screen time. Certainly there is a different response when he sees me in person.  All senses are involved, not just sight and sound. I’m round, dimensional, complex, complete.

Because I’m spending the night in Menlo Park, I participated in my grandchild’s bath time.  He kicked and splashed and the more we laughed and applauded, the more he laughed and splashed.  The feedback was clear. I am loved and I am love. In my immersion in air and water, playing with both, and these funny big people who think I’m the most marvelous being in the world which, and I take the narrative back, he is and we are.

Allow yourself to be as appreciated as raucously and vigorously as a baby in the bath.  Splash Joy!