We woke up with an impulse to greet the morning in Sausalito.
Emily Dickinson:
Wonder is not precisely knowing.
Sausalito This Morning
Our Teachers
Yesterday I walked along the fairy trail. It was raining an hour before, and then the sun came out though I was sheltered in an Oakwood Valley of ferns, trees, and streams. It felt magical and now I peruse the photos and see images in the water, trees, moss, and lichen to explore. When I returned home I saw the camellia bush offering buds and blooms.
In being with so much transition, I’m with these words of Robert Thurman:
When you understand interconnectedness, it makes you more afraid of hating, than of dying.
Perception
As I settle into the newness of 2024, as though walking on fresh sand, I reflect on how a four year old views the world. When I told my four year old grandson we were walking toward a special bench, he saw a tree bent lengthwise like a log and ran to it. Is this the bench? Well, of course, it was. It was a place to sit.
When we walked around our yard, most of it natural, he saw a stack of dead bamboo piled to decompose. To him, it was a treasure trove. We now had magic wands, staffs, swords, and walking sticks. When we came upon some fallen branches, he saw antlers, so he and his grandpa made a headband of cardboard and attached the antlers with duct tape, and he was Bambi, the “adult” Bambi, not the baby one.
Today my brain froze as I dealt with computer issues, and I knew it was time to take the advice of Wendell Berry in his comforting and inspiring poem The Peace of Wild Things, and go to the water and birds.
“For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
Opening the Door to the New Year
The New Year
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.
The Power in Language
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.
New Year’s Eve
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
Candle, Heart, and Fire Light
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.
The Coyote
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.
A Solstice Pause
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.
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