Rising United
We need our independent bookstores. This Pablo Neruda quote used to hang outside City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.
Tyranny cuts off the singer’s head
But the voice from the bottom of the well
Returns to the secret springs of the earth
And rises out of nowhere through the mouths of the people.
Balance
Rumi:
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”
Photos from where I live.
Land
More and more I learn about the importance of the land where we live. We moved a great deal when I was growing up, as did my husband’s family, and yet, when the two of us came to Marin, we knew this was “it”. I looked out on the ridge and knew I was home.
The Coast Miwok lived here, peacefully. It’s a peaceful, nourishing, nurturing place.
In my meditation today, what came up was Mr. Wheelwright who donated the land where Green Gulch Farm Zen Center now beckons and thrives. He and his wife had lived happily there, and he wanted the land to continue to be loved and cared for. It’s on the other side of the ridge from where I live, flowing down to the Pacific.
I think of what brings happiness. When I was in Nepal, I read Dominique LaPierre’s book The City of Joy, about life in a slum in Calcutta and the joy he found there.
Musk wants to go to Mars. I wonder if Mars wants him. Perhaps we need the devastation he’s creating to bring us together and remind us what matters. It’s one planet, bound together economically, and morally, and not by the egos of a few.
“Be a Good Ancestor”
I just watched Roman Krznaric’s Ted Talk on looking at history to create our tomorrow. He offers the Maori proverb: I walk backward into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.
Lichen
There’s a saying that Annie Algae and Freddie Fungus took a “lichen” to each other, and so we have a symbiotic organism where algae provides food through photosynthesis and fungi provides structure, moisture, and nutrients. It’s not classified as a plant or animal. It thrives in unpolluted areas and can slowly, slowly, break down rocks.
I’m reminded of it when I read Heather Cox Richardson today – symbiosis and cooperation between differences, living and growing in harmony for the benefit of both.
Trump revels in telling lies. Most of us were raised to not tell lies but for him it is a game, a game he has won all these years.
We all know Russia invaded Ukraine. Putin thought he could walk in and own it in a few days but Ukraine has responded by uniting. What I didn’t know was this:
Trump lied that the U.S. has provided $350 billion to Ukraine and that half the money is “missing.” In fact, the U.S. has provided about $100 billion, which is less than Europe has contributed, and the U.S. contributions have been mostly in the form of weapons from U.S. stockpiles that defense industries then replaced at home. None of that support is “missing.”
From Heather: On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to “Kremlin Headquarters.”
When will the Republican party wake up and stop the madness?
The Need for Poetry
Yesterday in the New York Times, I read M. Gessen’s opinion piece, “They Invented a New Language for War”. Gessen reported from Odesa, Ukraine where the poets of Odesa are writing a chronicle of life in wartime, and changing the language they use.
I am reminded of two poetry books by Ilya Kaminsky. He was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977. In 1993, his family was granted asylum by the American government and came to the United States. Dancing in Odessa was published in 2004 in Canada. The book is a marvel. I see how much we need poetry. I offer excerpts from the poem “Praise”.
We were leaving Odessa in such a hurry that we forgot the suitcase filled with English dictionaries outside our apartment building. I came to America without a dictionary but a few words did remain:
And he lists his own definitions for words we know: Forgetting, past, sanity …
The poem goes on and comes to this:
On the page’s soiled corners
my teacher walks, composing a voice;
he rubs each word in his palms;
“hands learn from the soil and broken glass,
you cannot think a poem,” he says,
“watch the light hardening into words.
His book Deaf Republic was published in 2019. The book begins with the poem We Lived Happily during the War. It’s about living in the “great country of money”, America, and ignoring destruction in other countries.
The last poem in the book is “In a Time of Peace” and shows how we go about our daily lives even as the horror of what is happening is seen on our phones.
I contrast his amazing writing and insight with the news that, as of 1921, Yosemite’s annual budget is around $30 million. Trump’s trips to the Daytona 500 and Superbowl cost about $25 million. Accounting, anyone? Accountability? Sanity?
Who and what defines, and what language do they use?
Connecting with Water
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
Barry Lopez
Coming Together
My son made a film on The Singularity. I keep seeing the images, the rapid movement to the change. It ends with a brother and sister together again, watching, not knowing, as AI takes over. The image of Musk with a chainsaw at a gathering of conservatives is hard to shake and then I come to Robert Hubbell and Rebecca Solnit and I rise in an inner knowing that we come together for good.
You can read Rebecca Solnit’s essays at the link below but this is a taste of inspiration to keep us all going, gathered, and together.
Rebecca Solnit: Everywhere I went it felt like people were trying harder than usual to show up, to connect, to be their best selves. This is emergency behavior. This is how people behave when their city is bombed or flooded or burning down, this extra care, this extra presentness, this best self connecting with other best selves. Then, online, an actual pastor I knew reminded me that the word comfort means to fortify (com- as in with; fort as in fortress, fortitude, and fortify), maybe to fortify with kindness. We were fortifying each other with what we had to offer, which was ourselves, by really being with each other.
https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/this-is-really-hard-but-we-are-not-quitting-reflections-on-kindness-and-resoluteness/
Soft Power
I was just on a Zoom call with Russell Delman, founder of The Embodied Life. There were people from Spain, France, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Ireland, and Switzerland on the call.
Russell emphasized the soft power of an Open Heart. The theme was on how we can be moved by the power of a poem. A poem can build our immunity and give us strength to pull out of the rabbit hole of fear that a few are creating to disempower us. In this, we connect.
The heart is about courage, and we good human beings will not be trapped in this web of fear they’re spinning. Kindness wins, and begins with us being kind to ourselves, and ripples out like rings from a rung bell.
Read the Thich Nhat Hanh poem “The Good News” which begins:
The good news
they do not print.
The good news
we do print.
The poem concludes with:
Leave behind the world of sorrow,
of preoccupation,
and get free.
The latest good news
is that you can do it.
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