On Wednesday a friend and I sauntered the path that circles around the top of Mt. Tam. We climbed up to the Lookout Tower, the first place to catch a fire in the area. I’m still vibrating with the peaceful trampoline feeling of each cell bouncing within the sacredness of an open, expanded, and shared view.
Monday afternoon I was in Sausalito in the sunlight. Tuesday morning I was in Sausalito in mist and fog. Seeing came closer. I felt a special bond with those I passed, intimacy in this shared embrace.
Jane Goodall:
Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I’m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement.
My grandson turned four yesterday and was celebrated and honored with a Halloween birthday party of 50 people, most of them small. It was a feast of princesses, dragons, and Spiderman. A Harry Potter character arrived, and Madeleine, and the Cat in the Hat.
A castle Bouncy House was a hit as children climbed in and slid out.
Watching children bounce, slide, and play, I thought of how peace might be obtained. We each have a Bouncy House, or maybe every block in a neighborhood has one, and we gather to bounce and feast where there’s a place for everyone at the table and more than enough to share.
I was at the dentist yesterday. The office is decorated with pumpkins and bats.
Last night, a warm night, I lay outside on the deck with the moon and stars. Then, the wind blew in as though bringing threads to connect a time of year when the veil between the living and the dead thins.
I’m with this quote by Audre Lorde:
We have to consciously study how to be tender
with each other until it becomes a habit.
Wednesday night I got up around 2 AM and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When I turned on the light, a mouse jumped and ran across the counter. I jumped and shrieked, then went into the bedroom and shut the door from an invader that seemed huge.
Last night, having ignored the situation, I debated what to do. I cleansed everything and put all the food away. I emptied the bin and left it without even a bag.
This morning when I looked in the bin, I saw what I thought was either a sleeping or a dead mouse. Then it moved. I had time to observe it wasn’t gigantic and wasn’t a threat. I realized it had been able to climb out when there was a bag there but without it, it was stuck in the bottom of a slippery-sided bin. I covered the top and carried the bin up to the road and into plants and weeds, where bending the bin down, the mouse scurried out with room to hide and feed.
Last night a friend recommended a book her seventh grade granddaughter is reading. The book by Lois Lowry is from the series The Giver. At first it seems to describe a perfect world, but then you learn what’s sacrificed to create such peace.
I think of the mouse released from what might have seemed a perfect environment with warmth, safety, and food into an outside world into which there’s freedom and also hawks and cats.
No judgment on either realm, though another opportunity to examine what freedom and safety mean to each of us.
As I spray peppermint oil around the house to deter other mice, I listen to chainsaws as a neighbor cuts down even more trees. People worry about fires so they cut down trees, and then they deal with flooding. We live interdependently and in a world of complexity as we navigate the challenges and opportunities each day offers and provides.
I recently re-read the book High Conflict by Amanda Ripley. I highly recommend it. I’m with how the novel Lord of the Flies which most of us read in high school took a real-life incident where some boys were stranded together and worked peacefully to survive, and turned it into a book showing the opposite. I wonder why. May this world move toward and evolve in peace.
This weekend, we watched the movie Finding Nemo with my almost four year old grandson. Having seen it as an adult, I didn’t expect it to be so traumatic for a child that age. First, Nemo is lost and the father is frantic. Then Nemo is captured by a diver attempting to save a life, but to grandson it was torture to see Nemo trapped in a bowl.
After the movie we went online to look at all the sea creatures in the movie, and to explain the story a little more clearly. What’s with me now is how our planet is like a fish bowl. We share an aquarium that circulates water and air, and right now the disturbances, for us all, are huge.
Thinking of Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things”, I went to the marsh to “rest with the grace of the world” and be free.
My youngest son is 46 years old today. It’s a warm, sunny day with so much twittering it sounds like spring, but the Monarch butterflies are flying about which means fall.
Perhaps a day of celebrating birth unites all the years, brings the seasons together like a womb holding and preparing for emergence of a new coherence and birth.
I read recently that when two sand dunes approach, come together, and part, they leave behind a tiny sand dune. I’ve never observed this for myself but I immerse in the image of connection, separation, and birth.
The windows are open, unusual for here, and in the night I heard all the critters that come out to explore and feed in the dark. I forget how active the night is, and perhaps that’s another entry into appreciation of where life leads me now as I age and mature. What am I coming to see that I didn’t notice or acknowledge before? What fills and guides me now?
I just finished reading Returning Light: Thirty Years on the Island of Skellig Michael by Robert L. Harris.
The book is a poetic meditation on his 30 years as a caregiver and guide on the Irish island of Skellig Michael. He’s there from May to October, observing and living with thousands of birds, especially puffins, and the memories of the monks who a thousand years ago built on this rock a place to isolate and meditate. It’s a place for the waves of light to unite loneliness and belonging.
Harris writes: Emptiness. And light changing, and changing, the vision of ourselves.
Light! Change! Vision!
Who likes it?
I do!
This morning I was out in the dark with the stars and the moon. Brightness in the dark – Lanterns in the heart.
Upon needing to move from one home to another, Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend:
I am out with lanterns looking for myself.
This time of year, autumn, fall, reminds us to look for lanterns, even if it’s the orange of a pumpkin carved to better see the light within.
And as we toast, then eat the pumpkin seeds, we enter more deeply into the night light of meditation. Each moment seeds the web that connects.
Ram Dass:
Meditation offers an opportunity to have a different experience of consciousness, not as a separate individual but as part of an interconnected web of life.
Last night I watched the clouds play hide and seek with the moon. This morning, again, I’m entranced with images, movement, and change.
A monk asked the Zen Master:
What is meditation?
Not meditation.
Then what is it?
Alive.
– Zen Master Joju
Yesterday I was taking pictures in our yard when I was surprised to see a bee come out of a jasmine flower.
Rumi:
Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon’s reflections.
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