Cathy's Blog!

Posted on October 6, 2023October 6, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Passage

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!

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Lanterns

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.

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Watching Clouds

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

Posted on September 23, 2023September 23, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Invitations

Yesterday I was taking pictures in our yard when I was surprised to see a bee come out of a jasmine flower.

Iris invited to open in early morning light.

Rumi:

Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon’s reflections.

Posted on September 22, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

The Mountain

This morning I decided to drive to the top of Mt. Tam and walk around the circle at the top. When I got out of the car, the smell of the mountain plants in fall was beautifully overwhelming and filling. As I stepped onto the trail, I smelled the smoke from fires to the north. No view of San Francisco or the ocean today!

Looking from the mountaintop to the south

Smoke adds taste and smell to blue sky and clouds

The trail is still wet from early morning fog

A mountain home reverencing adventures of the past

Posted on September 22, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Landing

In Sensory Awareness, we often ask ourselves or another: Have you landed?

And usually I feel how much more landing can occur, how much more “coming down” and feeling energy, movement, and exchange there can be. How present am I?

Today I’m with transitions, noticing when I walk through an entry or doorway. I pause and contemplate as I invite immersion to journey within me as I enter a new room, a new place. Moving from indoors to out, or outdoors to in, is revelatory as to integrating liquidity and solidity in space.

I try to avoid politics here but lately it seems to require even more landing as I try to digest how close Trump came to a coup, and how even now he continues to try to destroy this democracy.

From Heather Cox Richardson today:

The extremists are bolstered by former president Donald Trump, who posted on his social media platform today that the Republicans in Congress “can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government…. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!”

Experts say shutting down the government would not, in fact, end the former president’s legal troubles, but he is actually doing more than that here: he is trying to assert dominance over the country. As Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said: “Let’s be clear about what the former president is saying here. House Republicans should shut down the government unless the prosecutions against him are shut down. He would deny paychecks to millions of working families & devastate the US economy, all in the service of himself.”

It is for each of us to continue landing within what we know is true as destructiveness and lies dissolve in the swelling oceans of truth.

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Equinox

It’s the time of noticing balance and harvest. Eyes brighten with the oranges of pumpkins, the yellows of squash., the culmination of spring and summer.

The Biden administration has announced the creation of the American Climate Corps, “a group of more than 20,000 young Americans who will learn to work in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience while also earning good wages and addressing climate change”.

Who could be against it?

The Bay area has been inundated with smoke from fires further north. I think most areas of the country have experienced increasing awareness of climate issues this year.

I’m with the words of Andrea Gibson:

I don’t have a single plan for my life more important than learning to love people well.

Of course, that begins with learning to love ourselves and the air we breathe in and out, the planet we share.

Posted on September 19, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

One Planet

My husband and I traveled a great deal in Asia back in the day. Now, my son is traveling in Kuwait and Oman. He’s there on business as were we. I now know camels don’t spit, are friendly and sweet, and certainly they are beautiful animals adapted to their environment. Chris slept alone under the stars. What a gift!

If only we were as adaptable as camels – the water bottle seems out of place.

Posted on September 17, 2023September 17, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Memory

A friend recommended a book, Good Night, Irene, a Novel by Luis Alberto Urrea. I knew what it was about but didn’t expect how personal it would become. My father flew a B-17 out of the base in England where the first part takes place. The author describes the drama and tension of the planes taking off and the wait to see who returned.

I sit here now caught in memories and sadness at the loss of my father who passed away in an accident in 1969. I feel memories of his experience, of how families share a history.

His crew completed the required missions, and then flew out of Italy. The B-17 he was piloting was shot down, and the crew parachuted out along a route that landed them in Austria. My husband and I went to the village where he landed, and met people who saw him land, who fed him, and turned him over to the SS as the village was small and undefended with only women and children left.

Seeing me they knew he lived. They wanted me to know they had no choice, and I understood. They talked of how tall and handsome he was which was true. He was half-German and half-Norwegian, and so again how strange this tragedy of war where depending where one lives determines what side one is on.

Oddly the village was so small, it had no jail or cell so he was held in a small room in which I then stood. The room is in an art center now. The exhibit in the building when I was there was of California landscapes so I felt myself caught in a melange of time travel. I was in the present, the past, and though in Austria seeing a landscape of where I live. I was disoriented and felt sick.

I sit here now absorbing it all. I know that life is impermanent, is always moving, and we honor the flow, and yet, there are places in us that, like stones, create the river’s song.

An Egret and Great Blue Heron observe the change in tides – Abbott’s Lagoon

Along the San Andreas fault line near Parkfield

Until recently, there was a bridge across this expanse and then it fell. Impermanence. Change!

Posted on September 15, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Rooted with Rock

More than 2000 years ago, the great Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu said: “The True Man breathes with his heels; the mass of men breathe with their throats.”

Walking brings breath to and through our soles, toes, arch, and heels; it brings us down to the ground.

Yesterday at Tennessee Valley beach, I was entranced with stone, with what surrounds, holds, guides.

At one point I walked on chert, and felt the ridges as though I was walking on the tail of a dragon. No wonder we love fairytales and I think now of the book by Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon, about a dragon who preferred writing poetry to fighting.

Ilse Middendorf said: “Perceiving our breath as it comes and goes we discover an opening into our unconscious life, and bring about a conscious expansion into the whole of ourselves.” The whole of ourselves, and I feel the breath move in a wave, connected like a Mobius Strip.