Low Tide at Stinson Beach Today
Summer
Yesterday I had an 8:00 dental cleaning. I arrived early at the marsh. At first I saw no birds, then, darting swallows and then two egrets. The water moves in and out, tidal like the seasons as we celebrate light and shadow in these long days of summer solstice.
Emily Dickinson:
To live is so startling, it leaves little time for anything else.
Early Morning Walk
I go down to the marsh to welcome Father’s Day, and the soon to be longest day of the year. The sun is shining. I wonder where the fog went and think of these words of Alan Watts:
The anxiety-laden problem of what will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand, or where my lap goes when I stand up.
It’s like that, living and dying happening all the time, signing and signaling the joy of being here now, today.
Play
When Mr. Fuji designed our Japanese garden, I learned that bamboo symbolizes enlightenment because it moves and sways. Yesterday I walked to a bench near my home and listened to the wind talking through the trees. I understood that enlightenment is movement; movement is enlightenment. Listening is movement; attention is grace.
Mark Twain said: I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Yesterday I started Andre Dubus III’s book, Such Kindness and read all the way through until midnight. The main character discovers we’re here to “play” the game. My father always spoke of work as play. It’s about our attitude as we listen to and move with the dance of the wind, and see our partners in this game we share, listen to them, receive them, as we play with the cards we are dealt.
Response
Last week we toasted marshmallows over an open wood fire. It’s so tricky, the matching distance to embers and fire to get the golden brown, or perhaps a black end, torched.
I sit here now considering the textures we are, the warmth and movement, heat and fluidity.
A woman I study with, Miren Salmeron, says “Give yourself your sweet attention.”
I do that now, feeling a coating respond to my environment and melt to the sweet.
Gratitude
Last night we watched the movie The Lost King about Richard III and how history was misaligned with the truth. One woman changed that. I remember when the news came out, and with this movie even more people will know the power of a vision in uncovering the truth.
Again, where I live is wrapped in fog and mist. It’s an invitation to meld even more intimately with the air, and the in and out of the nourishing and living chords and cords of breath.
Censorship
I’m disappointed to learn that Elizabeth Gilbert is removing a book she wrote that was to be published on Feb. 13, 2024. The reason is criticism from readers in Ukraine. Their criticism is that the book, The Snow Forest, is set in Russia.
The book is inspired by a true story of a religious Russian family, who, in the 1930’s, left Russia for a life of solitude in Siberia. They moved “to resist the Soviet government and to try to defend nature against industrialization”.
In a video message to her fans last week, Gilbert said, “This is a book that is going to take you into the deepest realms of the Siberian taiga, and into the heart and mind of an extraordinary girl born into that world, a girl of great spiritual and creative talent, raised far, far, far from everything that we call normal.”
I would love to read this book, and I find it puzzling that we are sending weapons to a country, to a people, that then tells us what we can read. I recognize this is probably a few frightened people, and I also recognize that not all Russian people support Putin or this invasion.
I worry that the next step will be that I’m told I’m not allowed to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace because it’s set in Russia.
Life is complex; people are complex but censorship is clear. It’s wrong to take away my right to choose what I read.
Surrender
As we come down and root we rise like a flower or tree. The maturing process brings one more and more into release, into the grounding rise that produces, distributes, and returns to the ground.
This morning I’m with these words of William Blake.
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
Presence
This week a calendar for 2024 arrives in my mailbox. It’s from The Nature Conservancy. I understand their need for money to preserve our natural areas, and yet, immersed as I am in the past right now with memories ripening like fruit, I feel a calendar from the 1950’s would be more appropriate for me and there’s this quote from Charlotte Joko Beck:
Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.
The Ocean
The ocean is one of my special places. My plan is to have my ashes scattered there. Perhaps honoring each wave, so unique, yet part of the whole is what guides me as though I know I have lived more of my life than remains to come, this is the time to integrate and prepare for that final crash or gentle meeting of the shore where water dissolves and lifts.
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