Last night we sat outside expanding on starlight as we watched for meteors. This morning it’s raining. My father died 56 years ago tomorrow. Memory rides on beams and beads of light.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
As you inhale, fill your heart with compassion, and as you exhale pour the compassion over your head.
Already I see and feel the increasing light. I open Mary Oliver’s book Owls and Other Fantasies since this morning I was out early to hear an owl’s joyful hoot of goodbye to night.
In one essay called Bird, she writes of finding an injured black-back gull and bringing him into their home. Seriously injured, he survived in their home for a few months, bringing interest, comfort, and delight. Even as he was dying, she writes, “And still the eyes were full of the spices of amusement”. And then, …
“He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact, this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.”
And then, he wasn’t, but still each day morning comes with light.
Last night we enjoyed our ritual of cheese fondue, the blend of Emmental and Gruyere cheese melted with wine, as the swirl of bread catches the clasp and unclasping of changing years.
We each have our own rituals as we pause and contemplate what calls us now as we meet what comes.
This week is one of transition, as we, in the Northern hemisphere, come together to honor the return of light. The word halcyon is said to come from a mythical bird who, breeding in a nest floating at sea at the winter solstice, charms the wind and waves to calm.
My grandson loves the book Ziji: The Puppy Who Learned to Meditate, and from the photos in the book seems to associate Ziji with the Buddha. We were at my son’s home for Christmas Day, and when grandson saw the statue of the Buddha in the gazebo in their yard, he said Ziji. I sit with the image now, peace, a mind at peace.
I’m with the words of Edward O. Wilson:
It is possible to spend a lifetime in a magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.
Yesterday, I was at Sutro Baths in San Francisco. I checked out the Land’s End Visitors Center, a treasure trove of temptation, especially books.
From How To Read Nature by Tristan Gooley:
Plants react to colors. For example, if we are dressed in blue we can change the way a plant grows, while if we wear red we will influence its timekeeping. The process by which plants grow toward light is called phototropism and is only influenced by blue light. Red light, on the other hand, influences photoperiodism, which governs the plant’s sensitivity to the time of year. The changes in a plant that result from our choice of clothing color may be imperceptible to us, but the knowledge that they are reacting can change the way we think about them.
Today we were at Land’s End and the Cliff House. Who could not exult and be astonished.
In Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, he writes:
There’s a reason we are drawn
to gazing at the ocean.
It is said the ocean provides
a closer reflection of who
we are than any mirror.
Kevin Kelly reminds us:
The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.
In the Northern hemisphere, it’s the shortest day and longest night, the time of year when we light candles and build bonfires to welcome back the light. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years which makes sense when we consider how carefully our ancestors paid attention to and honored the changing of light and movement in the skies.
Misty Hannah led Sensory Awareness today and because this time of year we are so aware of shadow and light, she worked with noticing shadows where we were, and noticing and playing with shadows we ourselves make. How deeply does a shadow penetrate? There must be light in a shadow because we see it, so notice the depths, and how it feels to let light into your eyes when the lids are up or down. It’s a day to play!
It is a time of presence, of going within, and honoring light and dark. I revel in fluidity moving in and out like ocean and atmospheric waves.
If you are depressed you are living in the past, if you are anxious you are living in the future, if you are at peace you are living in the present.
– Lao Tzu
French philosopher Simone Weil:
“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, what are you going through?”
Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Yesterday, I appreciated the notification of a possible tsunami. A helicopter flew and hovered overhead. This morning I find myself remembering different translations of the words of Masahide:
My house burned down
I now see
The rising moon.
or
Barn’s burnt down —
now
I can see the moon.
When I got the notice to move to higher ground, though my house is safe, I left because my medical appointment required dipping down to drive by the bay. Though the notice was cancelled by the time I arrived, the office, which is by the bay, was still in a tizzy. They had evacuated, but my ophthalmologist said at first she didn’t know where to go, and then she thought of what it would be to leave and learn everything was gone. It was a time to reflect. Yes, though everything had returned to normal, what might have happened. Like that, change.
My meditation practice is about impermanence and interdependence. I think the political news has us all awake recognizing impermanence and interdependence.
I come to the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.
We’re being stretched.
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