Last week I took my usual plethora of photos at Stinson Beach but one stayed with me. This morning, I shared the photo with my son and he pointed out that what I had interpreted as an unusual wave was a shark. He then sent me a diagram showing that, like an iceberg, 90% of the shark can be underwater and we may see only the fin.
Now I see it clearly as a shark, grateful I didn’t pop in for a swim.
It’s Earth Day, as is every day since we, this planet, and our environment evolve as one. Last night I was out with the almost full moon, a reminder of the movement we share.
Heather Cox Richardson is again strong with her substack post. I pull this from it:
The timing of the Interior Department’s new rule can’t help but call attention to Earth Day, celebrated tomorrow, on April 22. Earth Day is no novel proposition. Americans celebrated it for the first time in 1970. Nor was it a partisan idea in that year: Republican president Richard M. Nixon established it as Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.
The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. Her exposé of how the popular pesticide DDT was poisoning the food chain in American waters illuminated the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms, and it caught readers’ attention. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Let us honor the Earth we are, the Earth we share, as we celebrate the Earth each day.
Today on an early morning walk down Tennessee Road to the beach, I was delighted to see a Great Blue Heron standing regally next to the path. Then on the way back up, I watched him or her catch, tenderize, and swallow a snake. The beach was completely different from the last time I was there, less than a week ago. Each moment received with the gusto of a heron harvesting and digesting a snake.
I drove to Stinson Beach this morning. I was early enough to be alone on the beach at low tide. When I lay back on the sand, I heard the waves from underneath and all around, pounding jets, surround sound. Sandpipers skittered and one turkey vulture enjoyed a breakfast of decaying seagull.
“Awakening is truly nothing more or less than being right here in this moment, just as it is, and just as we are.”
— JOAN TOLLIFSON
Yesterday I gave myself a meditative walk down Tennessee Valley to the beach. Today we have rain. I’m with the words of Emily Dickinson:
I dwell in possibility.
The other day I watched a little girl struggle to open a heavy door at Blue Barn restaurant. Her father kept offering to help until finally she allowed it, and when the door opened, she closed it, and went for it again. Finally, together they again opened the door, and entered the space, but she wasn’t finished. She turned around and pushed from the other side.
My grandson likes to be the one to open the door to their home when we arrive. We knock and wait, as we hear scurrying and discussion inside. Perhaps it is the energetic feel of the movement of the heavy door, the power involved, or something about inside and outside, but I find it intriguing to consider how I might pause before I open and close each door. How do I transition each precious breath?
This is the first, wildest and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.
– Mary Oliver
Yesterday my four year old grandson set a towel on the grass and invited me to sit on the boat. Another towel was the “cabin”. He then carried a plate of hard-boiled and colored Easter eggs outside to place inside our cabin.
Ebi, the dog, was allowed to join us on the boat. I was pretending to steer but unsatisfied with our navigational progress, he dragged his sit-on digger/excavator over, placed it in front of the towel, and sitting on it, began to steer the boat. Some plastic fish were thrown into the “water” for us to catch. He informed me he needs a haircut so he’s sleeker in the water for scuba-diving. He then “dove” into the water for that. When I returned home, I reflected on it all. What might I create with what’s here?
Because I’m aware each moment could be my last, I set intention for mindfulness, which is quite a task. I keep looking for reminders to reinforce my focus on presence, even though I know this is about knowing enough, and not needing to “seek” because all is here.
I’d been following the search for Caroline Meister, a 30 year old member of the Tassajara community. After an exhaustive search that included Search and Rescue teams, she was found. She’d fallen by a waterfall on a solitary hike, and hitting her head, died.
I read that a few days before she disappeared, a friend asked her, “What would you do if you knew you only had 48 hours to live?”
Her response, “I’d go for a long hike alone in nature.”
Yesterday I walked with a friend to the beach at Tennessee Valley. Though I was there ten days ago, it was completely different. Part of it was the light, filtered through a cold wind, but, also, despite rain, the creek had slowed, and it was possible to cross without taking off one’s shoes.
Also, the willows had filled in and the landscape was denser with plants. We didn’t see a bobcat but we did see a long, brown snake slithering into the path for warmth from the sun.
Snake paused when we paused so I saw he was harmless with his thin neck and sliver of a tail. I was reminded of Stanley Kunitz’s wonderful poem “The Snakes of September”. He writes of hearing snakes in the shrubbery all summer long, but then with autumn’s chill, he sees two of them, “dangling head-down entwined in a brazen love-knot”. The poem continues:
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.
Last night I watched the Worm full moon as it began to eclipse, and then, this morning there it was, a full disk shining through the trees. In two weeks, we’ll see a solar eclipse, and meanwhile the increasing light is beckoning buds to emerge, and birds to mate and nest.
Alan Watts:
You are something not that comes into the world, but comes out of it – in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant, or a fruit comes out of a tree. You are an expression.
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