This day offers space, a white sheet, a blue sky.
What calls us now? What meets us? What relationships beckon like tides moving in and out?
How do we meet this day as never before?
What comes together and breaks apart and comes together again?
As this box of Picasso Tiles says: Be creative. Be unique. Be you.
My four year old grandson has been staying with us. He loves words, and is fluent in our language and a language of his own. It’s clearly fun to play with sound as air winds round and round and plays with tongue and mouth as meaning and nonsense resound.
Today I removed the Christmas books from the wall system, and browsing through the bookshelves re-discovered The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.
They wrote it as a “spell book”, to conjure back twenty words lost from the most recent version of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Words like acorn, adder, dandelion, newt, otter and willow had been replaced by attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The outdoor and natural world had been replaced by the indoor and virtual. The lost word that most surprised me is “otter”.
The page on otter ends with this:
Ever dreamed of being an otter? That
otter underwater, thunderbolt, that
shimmering twister?
Run to the riverbank, otter-dreamer, slip
your skin and change your matter, pour
your outer being into otter – and enter
now as otter without falter into water.
And so now on this last day of 2023, do just that – “slip your skin and change your matter”. Today and tomorrow are days to conjure new ways to speak, be present, and play.
For me this is a day of contemplation and reflection.
I’m with the poem Dew Light by W.S. Merwin.
Dew Light
W.S. Merwin
Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age
It’s the time of year where we light candles and inhale the scent of winter, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m savoring the shared cheer. It’s a tender time, and may this pause to absorb all the holiday traditions nourish us on our journey into a new year.
On Thursday at Rodeo Beach, a coyote passed by me. I took pictures but it wasn’t until I looked at them at home that I realized the coyote was injured.
I checked the symbolism of a coyote: cleverness, resilience, and strategic thinking. It’s also seen as a symbol of death and rebirth, because coyote howling is often heard during times of transition, dusk and dawn.
This coyote wasn’t asking for sympathy though I felt it as he or she was rather mangy but the coyote simply pranced courageously along, an example of how to meet what comes.
I am grateful for a Sensory Awareness class this morning with Misty Hannah. We worked with curiosity, with what we might uncover or discover that we never knew before. She asked: Can we meet this moment as never before?
And I feel in this moment that I meet the teachings of a coyote and the universe gathering as never before. I ask and explore how many universes does it take to lift my foot from the floor? How many universes came together to bring a coyote close to me to share a wound that didn’t slow or alter a path? How many passages open before, in, and around me? How many universes do I bring together as I open to meet what comes?
Curiosity may have killed the cat but a cat has nine lives. Curiosity opens doors.
The light doesn’t return immediately. There is a pause.
This is my day to slip into quiet, and honor the words and advice of Wendell Berry.
“I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.”
Circles on Water.
Yesterday afternoon as I returned home, traffic was stopped. It took an hour to drive less than a mile. For some reason, I perceived it as a gift. I rolled the car window down, well, pushed a button actually, looked out at the marsh and listened to Holiday Songs.
As we honor this time of year in whatever way speaks to us, we also prepare for a new one. Intention sets a place of honoring the connections we share, the communities of which we are a part, and which are part of us. My intention is to more clearly see and honor the moments as gifts.
Living, blood flows, circulates, connects, and the breath comes in, nudges and explores, and moves out, changed, like circles on water. Our presence gives weight to the stones.
Nature calls to me on this shortest day of the year so I go to the Marin Headlands and Rodeo Beach. I carry with me these words from the book Open Heart, Open Mind by Tsoknyi Rinpoche: A shadow is projected by some source of light, and by recognizing and acknowledging our shadow selves we can begin to trace a path toward the light.
The is the time of year to look within and “trace a path toward the light”.
It’s a day to pause as the light begins to shift and we prepare to enter a new year.
May this be the year we move into the heart of longing for peace and release the tools and words of war.
I watched a video of the poet Jane Hirshfield last night. She spoke of how Kinship will save us, the acknowledgment of our interconnection. Perhaps we could say to every tree we pass: sister, sister, sister. We can ask our natural friends, our relatives, the mountains and plants, what they can teach us. This is a time to listen.
I’ve always loved the work of Alexander Calder, his mobiles and circuses. Jane was asked if darkness is required in great art. She used his work as an example of such lightness, beauty, and happiness that reflection is required to find the mortality. It’s in the delicacy of his creations. They move and sway, fragile in their time here, as are we.
The psychologist Carl Jung wrote: The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war.
May this be the year we acknowledge our kinship and grow the heart of our desire for peace and the wind and breath chimed grace of love.
Here is the link to the talk if you’re interested:
Santa always makes a trial run at our house but today when I left in the rain, I realized he also trains young reindeer to know the route of the sleigh.
Today I saw two young deer practicing navigational maneuvers in the rain.
Today it’s raining. I listen and think of the salmon now able to swim up into Muir Woods along Redwood Creek. What a gift!
Yesterday, my son, grandson and I went to the Nutcracker Ballet in San Francisco. What a visit to Fantasy, Fairy, and Dream Land. I’m still circling on my toes, lifted into the air. We also went in City Hall where many weddings were taking place, to the Fairmont Hotel to see the decorations and walked around Union Square. Today I balance on integration and knowing enough.
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